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Inside the Factory

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Factual: Food & Drink

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A look at some of the largest factories in Britain.

Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey hit factory floors across Britain for a snoop around their supersized production lines. What are the secrets behind our supermarket staples?

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Ruth Goodman

Cherry Healey

Gregg Wallace

Voltage TV Productions Ltd

Steve Tait

Geraint Lewis

Simon Cross

Chris Titus-King

Rhys Plume

Tim O'Brien

Jamie Home

Michael Wood

Celeste Harper-Davis

Natalie Chodakowska

Rachel Drew

Samara Friend

Tim Hansen

Ruth Horner

Katie Louise Clarke

Fran Jarvis

Phillip Smith

Jon Alwen

Sanjay Singhal

Emma Pound

Amanda Lyon

Inside the Factory: Series 4: Episode 2: Toilet Roll

Toilet Roll

Episode 2

Episode 2: Toilet Roll

Series 4

BBC Two - Inside the Factory, Series 4, Toilet Roll

Gregg Wallace explores the Manchester factory that produces 700,000 toilet rolls a day.

Documentary series. Gregg Wallace explores the factory that makes 700,000 toilet rolls a day and Cherry Healey gets the bum deal of following a flush through the sewers.

Gregg Wallace explores the Manchester factory that produces 700,000 toilet rolls a day. He begins 940 miles away in Sweden, where the raw material - wood - is harvested from a sustainable forest of one billion spruce trees. Most of the wood is used for timber, but the offcuts are turned into sheets of wood pulp. Gregg follows this pulp to Manchester, where he learns that two types of wood fibre - long and short - are required for a loo roll, to give it strength but also softness. He watches as 3,750 kilos of fibre are combined with 34,000 litres of water and sprayed into a 40-metre-long, 11-metre-high paper-making machine. It takes just four seconds for the watery pulp mix to be transformed into soft, dry paper. It is then rolled onto a 1.2 tonne supersized toilet roll known as a 'mother reel'. Each one of these gives birth to 25,000 individual toilet rolls.

Meanwhile, Cherry Healey is at Britain's oldest toilet factory, where they churn out 1,000 loos a day. And she gets the bum deal of following the flush through the sewers and water treatment works of Brighton, finding out how sewage is cleared of debris, grease and bacteria, and transformed into clean water in a little over an hour after flushing. She has a cheeky encounter with a high-tech Japanese toilet and heads to Cranfield University to see a prototype toilet that does away with the need for water altogether. Could this be the toilet of the future that gives one-third of the world's population access to efficient sanitation?

Historian Ruth Goodman finds out what was used to wipe with before the invention of toilet paper. She discovers that the weapon of choice in the American midwest was a dried-out corn cob. And that it wasn't until the 1930s that toilet paper was guaranteed 'splinter free'. She is also in myth-busting mode, finally laying to rest the idea that Thomas Crapper invented the modern toilet. She heads into the House of Lords to check out an 18th-century flushing toilet, still in use today, and discovers that the Great Stink of 1858 expedited a period of sanitary invention that led to the toilet we know today.

Inside the Factory: Series 4

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Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey visit some of the biggest factories in the UK.

Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey visit some of the UK's biggest factories to follow the relentless 24-hour production lines that produce our favourite products on an epic scale.

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