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In a bubble with the world looking in

Tim Scoones Tim Scoones | 13:21 UK time, Saturday, 31 May 2008

Aaaaaaaaah! The weekend at the end of Week One is upon us. Time to catch our breath, look back at what has worked (and hasn't worked) this week and get a little more sleep. All the time reviewing which animals and stories the camera teams and story developers should be focusing on before Monday's show, when the Springwatch madness starts again.

Already there seems to be a huge mystery emerging at the swallow's nest and there's news from "Toilet Duck" (as she is now affectionately called). Check out the webcams and the messageboards to get the latest - from us, and from you...

On Thursday night a number of the production team came round to the hotel where Bill and I are staying and we had a proper end of week drink (or two, or three). Well deserved, we all thought. It's been a full-on week in our new home with so much change and unpredictability to deal with, not to mention the worst run of bad weather we have ever had at the base location since Springwatch began.

At least Simon King and his team have had much better weather than they usually have - I guess that's just statistics for you. Or is it karma? Simon certainly deserves good weather and good karma, because he's cooking on gas up there! Amazing stuff. I always wonder whether Simon can beat what he did last time... and then he does. Respect to you, Si.

Back to the hotel bar on Thursday night. In between wine-fuelled discussions about whether we prefer jelly beans, Gummi Bears or Murray Mints (all from the rather fabulous middle drawer of our production office filing cabinet, which is full of sugar-fix goodies to sustain weary souls through long days), we were reflecting on how surreal it is to work on the Springwatch team during the live broadcasts - like being in a bubble with the world looking in.

Let me explain. What we do is extremely intense and we have an incredibly tight knit team of people who are absolutely focused on getting the show and the website on air, day in, day out. We rarely move more that a few yards from our Portakabins heaving with broadcast technology.

You would think that we had a very clear idea of how you, the audience, are experiencing this year's Springwatch event. But we don't. We're very challenged by our internet broadband connectivity here. We need a huge "pipe" and we use most of it to broadcast OUT, rather than getting stuff back IN. So it's actually rather difficult for us to see the website (videos, webcams etc) in the same way you do. We never see the show on telly like you do because we are so busy making it. So our experience of Springwatch is totally different to yours.

But we still get a sense that Springwatch is out there in the public domain, and being talked about. We know that at one point during Monday's show, there were 4.6 million people watching. The messageboards are going crazy as usual. We are being blogged about in and . I went to a newsagent and noticed we were front page of the Daily Sport, turned on the radio and heard Terry Wogan talking about us on Radio 2.

Even "Have I Got News For You" had a reference to us last night (check it out on i-Player, right at the end of the show - a bizarre photo of a badger watching telly). Even some of our phone conversations are being overheard on our webcams' audio.

Hence the strange feeling - being in a bubble in our production village seeing no-one else but our close-knit production community, and yet knowing that the world is peering in. Imagine if those poor unsuspecting animals knew they were being watched live by so many people?!

It may have been the wine, but we concluded that we were beginning to get an idea of what it must be like to be a contestant on a reality show like "I'm a Celebrity..." or "Big Brother"... never quite sure how it's all going down with the great British public. From what we can tell from the perspective of our little bubble, it seems that we are doing okay so far.

But what do YOU think? You're seeing the show and the website in a completely different way. How's Springwatch 2008 going for you?

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