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My name is Paul Wright and I’m the Executive Producer for this year’s programme, broadcast live on Â鶹ԼÅÄ One on Friday. I’ve been asked to blog about what’s been involved in putting together this year’s live charity fundraising TV show.

First, a little about me. I joined the Â鶹ԼÅÄ in 1998, working first in the newsroom on the sports news for News 24 (when it was still called News 24), progressing to Â鶹ԼÅÄ Sport working mainly on Match of the Day and a bit of Grandstand, the Athens Olympics and the European Football Championships for the next seven years or so.  For the past seven years I’ve worked in entertainment production, on documentaries like Comedy Map of Britain, entertainment shows like Strictly plus a load of behind-the-scenes documentaries for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Three too, like EastEnders Revealed.

My charity show experience started with Sport Relief a few years ago. I’ve been a Series Producer on Children in Need two years running, and now this year, I’m the Executive Producer.

By show night on the 15^th November we will have about 250 people working on Children in Need, including our production team, the crew, the charity staff, press, marketing and digital staff.

It’s a massive machine that makes seven and a half hours of live television. It’s something exciting to be involved in. Children in Need is seven hours of television to make. When we stare at the blank piece of paper back at the beginning of production, it can sometimes seem a bit daunting.

Like all big productions, Children in Need grows from small beginnings. Back in April of this year myself and a development assistant producer began exploring ideas in earnest for about eight weeks, trying and planning what we could do, working out what opportunities were coming up, which celebrities might be around, and  beginning to think in earnest what the show could be.

There are of course tried and tested ways of approaching it: we know we will go to the Nations and Regions for a certain number of times in the night; we know we will need about 12 appeal films; we know that we need to make a certain amount of ‘thank you films’. We work out how many music performances we need, how many entertainment items we’ll need on ‘tape’, and then how many studio items we need. The hardest job of all, I think, is getting the mix right, in such a way that it appeals to everyone in the audience from children to grannies, to mums and dads.

At the end of those eight weeks we don’t have a finished show so much, but we do basically have a plan, meaning we can put a lot of the early calls in to presenters, and get a lot of the booking done quite early.

Even after that initial eight week period, we still only have a small team working on production for the end show. A total of six producers work on Children in Need between June and November: me, a series producer and four other producers, supported by a small production team. That’s it.

Recruiting those producers is tough, because they need a wide range of attributes. For example, the person looking after the live Call The Midwife performance in the show, is the same person who’s looking after the pre-recorded Harry Hill sketch and the Catherine Tate sketch (pictured). So they need to be producers who can work with a wide variety of performers, but also need to understand how to produce and direct pre-recorded material and know how to work in a live studio environment. They might be working on sketches or highly choreographed dance numbers. Such a broad skill-set calls for great knowledge, and considerable amounts of experience and flexibility. It makes the role a unique job.

Like , our big challenge this year has been that Children in Need isn’t at Television Centre. That’s a huge change because the show has been at Television Centre for 32 years.

At Television Centre there was sense of a familiarity: we’ve known from experience for example that at TVC we require 54 dressing rooms and that we can turn them around three times during the broadcast, giving us capacity for 150 dressing rooms throughout the night. Elstree has nine dressing rooms. So we are building a campervan village at Elstree, shipping in campervans for the night, parking them up in the old Grange Hill car park, and constructing a cover over all of them. Essentially, we’re building one big dressing room village to house everyone coming to perform for the nation.

Collaboration has been the only way we can rise to these kinds of challenges. For this one night we’ve worked with people from Â鶹ԼÅÄ Resources, Â鶹ԼÅÄ Studios and Post Production, the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Academy, and Â鶹ԼÅÄ Ellstree site management. Children in Need is no small undertaking.

The great thing about Elstree this year is that there’s a fantastic 'playground' there for us. The EastEnders set and Albert Square is a great backdrop. EastEnders have always traditionally given us something for Children in Need, often it’s a song and dance routine, last year it was a comedy piece with Lord Sugar in the Square. What might they think about us using the square this year? Eastenders exec Dominic Treadwell-Collins and company manager Carolyn Weinstein have been totally supportive about the possibility of using the location.

So, on Friday you’re going to see JLS perform in Albert Square. You’ll also see the cast of EastEnders dance live.ÌýIt’s never been done live before, so that’s required a whole separate outside broadcast team to go into Albert Square. Our ambitions have really ramped up this year.  

We’ve also collaborated with the One Show who have very generously let us have the finale of their Children in Need Rickshaw challenge so it will finish in Albert Square. That will be a fantastic moment, one I’m really looking forward to.

Children in Need and other charity telethons rely on the goodwill and collaboration of everyone on the programme. We rely on a great many other people across the Â鶹ԼÅÄ who want to participate in Children in Need in order to make the show a success.

They do it for one reason only, they do it because it’s the Â鶹ԼÅÄ’s charity. That’s what they tell us.  We are incredibly grateful for their generosity and enthusiasm.

You can find full details of the incredible line-up for the night on the , but let me use this opportunity to give you some of the highlights.

Harry Hill (above) parodying Aha’s iconic pop video Take On Me – I don’t want to give the game away particularly, but it involves Harry chasing a large sausage.

Catherine Tate’s sketch show favourite Nan will be back and will be laid up at Holby City where she will be the worst patient in the world. Frank Skinner has opened the doors to Room 101 specifically for children, giving three of them the opportunity to vent their pet peeves.

Ellie Goulding is performing the Children in Need single this year, How Long Will I Love You, One Direction will be performing in our studio, Doctor Who have given us a scene from the 50th Anniversary episode. The stars of Call The Midwife will be performing in the studio and Matilda the Musical are coming in and they’re going to perform a medley.

The Strictly team have been brilliant, giving us an hour of their rehearsal time to record a special Strictly Come Dancing for Children in Need with Torvill and Dean: can the legends of ice-dancing pull off the same trick on the dance floor of the ballroom?

There’s a number of things to measure our success. The money raised on the night is massively significant, we want to raise as much as we possibly can. It’s with that in mind that probably, one of the best things about this job is the 12 appeal films you see during the show – which we make. When you see the appeal films it’s almost like a short-cut to make you realise why you are doing this job. I challenge anybody not to be moved by those appeal videos. That’s ultimately why we are doing it.Ìý If the money we raise helps the people who need it – the disadvantaged children in the UK who we see in the appeal films, that’s a real success.

For me this is about putting on the best show we can, and if we break the record, amazing. But, the bottom line we’re working to raise as much money as we possibly can. I really hope you enjoy the show on Friday night.

Paul Wright is Executive Producer, Â鶹ԼÅÄ Children in Need

• is on Friday 16 November 2013 on Â鶹ԼÅÄ One from 7.30pm.Ìý
• On Thursday 15 November 2013 at 8pm, Â鶹ԼÅÄ One broadcasts , a special line-up of musical performances from the Hammersmith Apollo.Ìý
• Last week we blogged about .Ìý
• Read more about what the of and some of the Â鶹ԼÅÄ's other .Ìý