I know way more about the Luton police station than I ever thought I would. I know that sometimes Detective Sergeants have to have impassioned telephone debates with the Crown Prosecution Service (which are always, in a very British way, extremely polite, but nonetheless called a “huge fight” afterwards). I know that if they succeed in getting the charge they are arguing for, such as a GBH upped to Attempted Murder, that they are quite likely to follow up the phone call with a silly dance and quiet gloating to every colleague they come across for the next ten minutes. I know that desks are often a mess, that who makes the tea has little to do with rank, and that no one really wants the responsibility of fetching abandoned hamsters from a house where carnage has occurred. I know all this because I never miss an episode of the utterly outstanding 24 Hours in Police Custody. The Channel 4 series is the latest in a rapidly growing crop of “fixed rig” television programs, which have, quite simply, transformed my television viewing in the last few years. They have taken me behind the doors of real life British communities, placing me front and centre of dramatic, transformative moments – and all of the even more compelling quiet moments in between.

Simply put, the fixed rig takes the technology of the Big Brother house – multiple cameras operated remotely – and transplants it to the real world. In the experienced hands of some of the most talented factual film-makers in the world, magic then occurs. What is most compelling about every fixed rig series I have seen, is watching human interactions occurring in as natural a setting as possible – that is, without the intrusive presence of a camera crew. Yes, those being observed know that cameras are there, but filmed 24 hours a day for weeks on end, they very quickly cease to play up to the camera. “Fly on the wall” is an overused, much criticised term, but it is perhaps most appropriate here. An enormous amount of behind the scenes labour goes into bringing about the quietest of scenes.

The original real world fixed rig series was The Family, which I wrote about after it debuted in 2008. Over a mackerel lunch at a Shoreditch Vietnamese restaurant with independent producers Magnus Temple and Nick Curwin, then Channel 4 Commissioning Editor for Documentaries Simon Dickson hatched the plan for the Family. He commissioned Temple and Curwin, then of Firefly Productions, to make an eight hour series on a single family. Twenty one cameras filmed them for four months, audiences were hooked, and a new genre was launched.

Five years on, and hundreds of hours of fixed rig programming later, I feel the time has come to look at how this way of filming has infiltrated British broadcasting – and is having an effect globally. I recently interviewed Nick Curwin, who has spent much of the last half decade overseeing a raft of award winning series, from The Family to One Born Every Minute. In 2010 he founded The Garden Productions with Magnus Temple, where they have make 24 Hours in A & E, which has sold to more than 100 territories around the world, and 24 Hours in Police Custody, which first aired in September.

Did you ever think you would be here, just a few years later, seeing such a change in British television?

NC: I don’t know how many rig shows are in production today – there seems a lot – so that seemed unimaginable. On the one hand, I think the main people who were having that conversation at the time really felt, right from the get go that we were on to something. There was a fantastic belief that this was going to be amazing. We were very very excited. It’s brilliant that it has become a prolific idea but I don’t think we would have anticipated it at the time.
When I first started making factual television, I thought if you could somehow or other instead of revisiting things that had happened in the past, if you could throw a net over actuality circumstances and show them actually happening wouldn’t that be a fantastic thing? So the rig in a way is a way of doing that. It was all about, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to film these things as they actually happened. But you’d need this vast array of cameras to do it and you’d need to be in the right place. So that’s where we ended up with the Family because it was Simon’s suggestion to say why don’t we use that in a family home.

What are the biggest difficulties in making a fixed rig series?
NC: Now it is difficult for different reasons. If we’re doing 24 Hours in Police Custody, to find a police force which allows you to put 70 odd cameras on the walls of their police station is very difficult. Likewise 24 Hours in A & E you say to a hospital what you want to do and they say ‘you’ve got to be kidding!’. So that’s very difficult and it’s very hard to win that access. Although we now have that track record – if they can talk to people we’ve worked before that helps us. With The Family we didn’t have that track record, we didn’t really know what it was going to be like, so it was hard to articulate that. And of course it’s an incredibly difficult private situation, a family home, so they’d have to in a way be very brave to let us do it.

But in a way one of the hardest things from our point of view was not just persuading a family to let us do it but finding the right family. Because in a way we always thought we were sort of making a drama rather than a documentary, but the people in it were also the writers. We didn’t tell them what to do so they were the writers, the producers and the stars. So they were the providers of the content in every possible way. So you had to think really cleverly about what sort of person would be able to provide the best possible content.

The editing is key to all these programs, isn’t it?
NC: Of course. We have been blessed with fantastic editors. But that’s very difficult as well — it’s another challenge we face. Because we’re making thirty episodes of 24 hours in A & E at the moment and 20 hours of Police Custody. That’s 50 hours and the editing is key. So trying to get fantastic editors to do that is very difficult. But we have this magic bullet for that which is an editor training scheme. We have brilliant editors in charge and then we hire inexperienced young editors and we use is as a training opportunity and train them in the edit.

24 Hours in Police Custody has some amazing scenes. What have been the particular challenges?

NC: Finding Luton was a huge challenge. It took something in the order of a year to get accesss to a police station to make that so quite obviously an extended period of development. I suppose the other challenge we face with that production is it’s not purely a rigged show – it’s a hybrid. It’s quite a big rig – it’s not as big as 24 Hours in A & E but it’s more than three times the rig for The Family and nearly double the rig for One Born Every Minute. But we also have three or four roving camera crews who are filming in a more traditional way, out and about. We were nervous about putting together rig and non rig material. It’s worked fine in the edit but we didn’t know it would at the time. And our previous experience with trying to do that hasn’t worked very well. In the first series of The Family we filmed loads and loads of them out and about and didn’t use a frame of it because it felt really odd to put the two things together. So that was a challenge, seeing whether that would work. But with 24 Hours in Police Custody, because the two things dovetail so perfectly together – when we have a cop interviewing a suspect in the police station and at the same time other cops are searching that suspect’s house, and they come back with something that is useful to the interrogation – then it just has to go together. So that really helps us I think.

What is it about the rig that yields such compelling material?

NC: One of the thing that you get from the rig that you probably can’t replicate unless you are using a rig is the fact that you are cutting around multiple cameras. And the effect that that gives you is something that is a bit more like drama. So you are much more connected emotionally with what is going on and you are observing it much more closely. And you can’t do that with a factual program in a scene of actuality unless you either have more than one camera or ask people to do it again and film as you do with actors. But you can’t ask people to do it again in a factual program because obviously it is not real anymore and you’ve got no authenticity. So you have to have lots of cameras.

The rig partly gives you the ability to be everywhere – so we’re in multiple places in a police station at once, likewise in a hospital. And that enables you in turn to, for example, make a show out of just one 24 hour period where if you had one camera you couldn’t. But it also dramatically affects the quality of the scene so in the interview rooms in 24 Hours in Police Custody, we have four cameras in there and also they are remotely controlled, so we are getting different kinds of shots. And so a scene edited from that footage is always going to be much more engrossing than a scene from one camera.