Original subtitles

Hello. Today, I'm at a factory.

Sorry, I've still got a throat.

Oh, that's better. That can produce

up to 36 million throat lozenges every single day.

Oh, look at this.

I'm Paddy McGuinness.

Oh, that's good.

A reluctant superhero.

Is this not the worst Avenger you've ever seen in your life?

In the fight against the symptoms of colds and flu.

I absolutely love that. Like a machine gunner for all passengers.

Hard at work.

For God's sake, Brian, slow it down. I'm not a machine.

To provide the relief that a snotty -nosed nation needs.

And while I learn how to soothe a sore throat.

And a banging headache.

Cherry Ely is rounding up the ingredients.

I'm in search of honey.

Uncovering the stomach -churning habits of nature's hard -working heroes.

When a honeybee gets back to the hive, it regurgitates its collective nectar.

Obviously it regurgitates it.

And our resident historian, Ruth Goodman, is prescribing the shocking

the local pharmacy.

You could buy...

Arthnic, strychnine, cyanide. Over -the -counter with no oversight.

And no prescription.

Wow.

This factory pops out an incredible 230 million tablets and

lozenges every single week. Welcome to Inside the Factory.

Play the title.

Are you okay? You alright?

Yeah.

Love these doors.

They don't, uh... Love this door.

I'm at the Wreck -It factory in Nottingham where they make enough pills

tablets here to fill the biggest of medicine cabinets.

Whether you've got a nasty cold coming on or just a bit of indigestion,

there's a good chance that if there's an over -the -counter medicine to soothe

it, they make it here.

And today I'm following the production of not one, but two medicines.

Strepsils, honey and lemon lozenges, and Neuropen, ibuprofen.

Now, clearly, I've no idea about making pharmaceuticals, but I do know that this

factory takes it very seriously indeed.

Because even me designer stubbles, they've got to be covered up.

But the main thing is, I've still got me dignity.

Let's make some pills.

And you can't have a honey and lemon lozenger, yeah, that's how we say it,

without some honey.

They get through 175 ,000 litres every year, making lozenges to ease our

scratchy brawl.

And I'm on my way to meet it.

Right.

More?

What are they doing here, splitting the pattern?

I tell you what, is this not the worst Avenger you've ever seen in your life?

Meanwhile, the hero ingredient for my lozenges, the honey, has been taken to

factory's high -tech Dust 3 testing station.

Keep going, mate. In this chamber of highly filtered air... Only authorized

personnel are allowed in to meet Lozinger supplier lead Richard Tagg.

Hey -o, Rich.

Hi, Paddy. How do we do this? Is it all... I mean, it's all... How are you,

He's on the elbows.

Safety first.

This is the next level. This is the most I've ever had to do when it comes to

PPE and everything else. Why is it so stringent?

So because we're a pharmaceutical factory, from a safety and quality

perspective, we have to make sure that we cannot... contaminate any of our

products all our raw materials that come into the factory have to be sampled and

tested so tim's going to take that away for testing okay how many cough drops in

there then rich these aren't cough drops these are medicated lozenges that we're

making today a medicated lozenge coats the throat to relieve the symptoms and

discomforts of a sore throat it's cleft as a medicine and you're only allowed up

to 12 lozenges per 24 hours we use honey for a flavor And we add our medicines

and active ingredients later within the process.

These are the things you do not even think about when you pick up a lozenger.

Tim's put the honey through its paces to meet the factory's strict quality

controls.

Yep, that's good to go.

Get her out, pal.

So it's safely sealed up again for transit out of the airlock.

And we can start the clock on production.

While the honey heads off to be transformed into lozenges, it's got me

How do bees actually make the stuff?

Cherry's on the case.

I am Paddy, and I am buzzing to visit a specialist research facility run by the

University of Oxford.

Scientist Dr. Jonathan Patrick is a serious bee boffin.

Lovely to meet you. Good to meet you. Welcome to the Bee Lab. The Bee Lab.

What do you actually study? So we're interested in bee nutrition, bee

bee physiology.

Making sure the bees are healthy and healthy bees will tend to produce more

honey. Why do bees make honey?

Well, they're not making it for us. What?

they don't make it for us no they're actually making it as a store to see

through the winter bees make honey to feed the colony and to make enough

for the cold weather they must collect plenty of the main ingredient nectar

flowers during spring and summer what exactly is nectar the nectar is

produced by plants

to encourage bees and other pollinators to visit their flowers.

It's a sugary liquid which is essentially carbohydrates, so it powers

flight and it's also something that the bees will be taking back to their colony

to feed the colony members as well.

So it's not just that bees collect nectar to take back to make honey at the

hive, they actually eat it as a snack?

Exactly.

Bees collect nectar using a proboscis, which is like a long tongue, especially

evolved to lap up the sweet liquid from the centre of the flower.

Well, how does it then transport it to the hive if it's already eaten it? So a

honeybee has a special storage organ inside its abdomen called the honey

stomach.

The honey stomach is an expandable pouch which can hold around 30 milligrams of

nectar.

But how does it get turned into honey?

So when a honeybee gets back to the hive, the first thing it does is offload

collected nectar to a receiver bee. How does it hand it over?

Yeah, so I'm not sure you're going to like this. So it regurgitates its

collected nectar. Obviously it regurgitates it.

To demonstrate how this happens inside the hive, Jonathan has mixed sugar with

water to create his own artificial nectar.

Doesn't take long before the bees suck it up.

They absolutely love that.

And share it out.

There we go, there we go.

So you can see one of the bees has got its proboscis out and is drinking the

nectar from the other one.

As the liquid nectar is passed from one bee to another, some of the water

evaporates, increasing the concentration of sugar, but not yet raising the

levels enough to transform it into honey.

Next is typically around 20 % sugar, whereas honey, we need to get up to

something that's around 80 % sugar.

How on earth do the bees get rid of so much water? The best place to see that

actually in the hive.

There are 12 hives in this outside lab.

An apiary manager... Is that Mark?

It is Mark, right?

Mark Lynch... Could be anyone.

..is using a little wood smoke to calm the bees down.

We are going inside the hive. We're going inside the factory.

OK, look at this. Wow.

Each hive has between 50 ,000 and 80 ,000 working bees.

That's incredible.

At this point, the nectar hasn't become honey yet. They still need to evaporate

more water from the liquid.

So there's still lots of work to be done by the bees to get it thicker and

sweeter. Yeah.

Each bee regurgitates nectar from their honey stomach into their mouth parts,

where even more water evaporates.

They repeat this process to fully concentrate the nectar, and they have

trick to finish the job.

The bees will continue to reduce the water content in the liquid by fanning

their wings to create an airflow through the hive that will evaporate the water.

The temperature of a hive is about 35 degrees, so the heat of the hive and the

fanning will reduce the water content even further.

So the fanning is almost like putting on a hairdryer? Yeah. That's brilliant.

After this final blow -dry, the water content is reduced to less than 18%,

leaving at least 82 % sugar, which means that it's now officially honey.

Oh, look at that. Look at that. We've got 82 .4%. Perfect. One, go!

But the bees' work isn't done yet.

In the wild, bees create these familiar hexagonal honeycomb shapes by secreting

wax from glands on their abdomen.

In a hive, the man -made wooden frames have a thin foundation layer of wax,

providing a neat template onto which the bees build their cells to store the

honey.

When the bees have finished processing the honey and it's become what we call

ripe, the bees will cover the cell over with wax to waterproof it. Right.

Because honey will suck moisture out of the air and without the wax coating, it

would become more watery again and eventually ferment.

As well as making enough honey to feed themselves through the winter, the bees

in a hive like this can produce an additional 22 jars worth of honey a

Enough for 87 ,307 individual throat lozenges.

So that's been regurgitated many, many times. It's been dried, it's been heated

by the hive, and then it's been sealed to be waterproof.

Yeah.

Takes a lot of work to make, honey, doesn't it? It certainly does.

Back at the most hygienically high -tech factory I've ever seen,

I'm settling into my surgical space loafers and

following the health and safety yellow brick road.

That's fancy. I like that. I like it.

I was going to say, when it comes to PPE, what's your favourite part?

Not the hairnets.

I quite like these glasses.

My fully tested honey has made its way to the mixing area.

But not as we know it, Jim.

Ah! Waiting for the airlock.

So everything's... Is it hermetic?

What's the word?

We call them airlocks, so you've got pressure differentials, basically.

Oh, right, OK.

Rich didn't want to say hermetically sealed either.

Here they are.

So the honey's piped up.

That's pumped into the mixer.

So is it just honey in there then, Rich?

No, we mix the honey with liquid sucrose and liquid glucose.

Sucrose is a complex sugar that comes from fruit.

Glucose is a simple sugar made up from cornstarch. If we just use liquid

alone, it would crystallise and produce a gritty lozenge. Whereas if we just use

glucose alone, it would melt the final lozenge. So we use both to build the

perfect structure to carry the medicine to our throat.

These sugars are combined with the honey to create the base mixture for my

lozenges.

The sweet mix then travels through a series of cookers, heating it to 140

degrees Celsius, removing 20 % of its moisture.

If we continued to cook at those temperatures, the materials would burn.

So to get around that, we drop the materials into a vacuum chamber.

water is boiled at 100 degrees Celsius.

So this vacuum allows us to boil a lot lower, around 30 degrees.

The vacuum chamber lowers air pressure, so a lot less heat is needed to expand

the water molecules into gas, which brings the moisture level down to 2%.

Next, tartaric acid from fruits

like grapes and avocados is added to enhance the flavour of the lozenges.

But we've still got to add the medicine.

Where's that done?

So the medicine is made in dispensary.

That sounds very chemistry, very pharmaceutical.

I like it.

Richard, it's been a pleasure, pal. We'll look at the next bit.

While Rich oversees my scorching hot mixture, I'm off to meet technical

director, Dr Jenna Buckley.

Who has a door with no airlock?

So maybe things are getting a bit more relaxed around here.

Hello, Jenna.

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Right, just one minute. You can't come

across the line if you've got a phone on you. This is an ATEX rated zone, which

is where we have to be extra specially careful when we've got fine dry powders

and flammable liquids.

Anything that carries an electrical charge might cause an explosion.

Understood.

Let's pop it on there.

Is it just anything electrical?

I'm sorry, you cannot bring over. No worries.

Yep,

keep going.

We might be here for a while, Jenna.

Great. Is that everything?

Yeah. Okay.

Right. One last thing, no cameras.

Jenna, we need them so we can see it on the telly. You can come over, but they

need to see it. They can't come with us, right? Get over there, pal.

Luckily, the lads have some paparazzi lenses.

Right.

What a place this is.

So these are the ingredients that go into our medicated lozenge. This is what

changes it from being just a sweet.

into something that can help take away your sore throat. So what causes a sore

throat? So most sore throats are caused by viruses. They attack the lining of

your throat.

They make it red, tender and sore.

So in our medicated lozenges, we have two ingredients.

These are the antiseptics that help kill viruses in your throat.

The first one is the amometal creosol.

And then the other is dichlorobenzyl alcohol.

This helps attack different bugs in your mouth and your throat.

And when they're combined together, they act to be stronger and take the pain

away.

First into the mixer go the antiseptic.

Next, we need some flavouring. We have lemon oil and the peppermint oil that

helps it expatriate this flavour.

Oh, so you add peppermint to get more lemon. We do, yes. The way it works in

your mouth, the peppermint makes the lemon taste better.

The flavourings are added and the mixture is heated to 35 degrees Celsius.

20 minutes later, my medicine is done and decanted into containers ready to be

sent to the production line.

As I'm quickly learning, and as you can see, there's a lot of rules and

regulations when it comes to medicine, but 200 years ago, not so much.

As Ruth has been discovering.

If you were sick in Victorian Britain, there was no NHS to turn to,

and doctors were expensive.

But Victorian pharmacies like this one, faithfully recreated at the London

Science Museum, stocked a range of products and potions that Catherine

the Royal Pharmaceutical Society knows all about.

I was wondering, this feels quite a grand sort of space.

What sort of things are people coming...

Two are chemists' four.

Well, the chemists and druggists would sell a whole range of things, ranging

from food, wine.

You could go for the opticians, get a tooth pulled.

So it wasn't just medicines that they sold.

It's not like the NHS now, where pharmacists are paid to supply you with

prescription medicine.

Even the poorest customers could afford cheap remedies for common ailments like

coughs and colds.

There were absolutely no restrictions on what these druggists sold or who they

sold it to.

This illustration dates to the 1860s. Oh, this is amazing, isn't it? We've got

this very emaciated little girl down here.

Please, mister, will you be so good as to fill this bottle again with laudanum?

Laudanum is basically opium and alcohol mixed together.

And you can see from her sunken in cheeks that this is a depiction of

who's already addicted.

So this is saying a child is an opium addict?

Yes. Children are quite often given laudanum as a soothing aid to help them

sleep.

And side by side with narcotics, with some even more sinister products.

And there's arsenic.

All sorts of poisons are constantly available.

Yes, Victorians have a slightly different understanding of poisons than

You could buy arsenic, strychnine, cyanide, all from your chemist and

Over -the -counter with no oversight.

And no prescription.

Wow.

Across town at the archives of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society... A few rare

relics from this unregulated Victorian era can be handled with great care.

Oh, gosh.

Arsenic complexion soap?

You'd be surprised at the products that arsenic found its way into.

I mean, in cosmetics.

It's a far cry from the heavily controlled ingredients.

used on Paddy's production line today.

Oh, we've got some throat pastels. Now, you'd think that would be all right,

wouldn't you? Allenbury's throat pastels.

Diamorphine and cocaine.

The diamorphine actually is a cost -suppressant, and then the cocaine is an

anaesthetic, so it would soothe your sore throat.

But these drugs could also be dangerously addictive.

Thankfully, from the middle of the 19th century, acts of Parliament were passed

to try to bring the chemists under control.

But it was a tragic case in Bradford that would change the pharmaceutical

industry forever.

There was a confectioner who was making peppermint humbugs like this.

And he was padding out the sugar, because it was so expensive, with a

Paris mixture.

And so he went to his chemist and druggist.

to get some, but he was accidentally given arsenic. Good grief.

And he mixed those into the sweets.

The finished sweets didn't look quite right, so were sold at a discount to

market trader Humbug Billy.

The sweets sold out fast, but proved to be deadly.

So we've got here dreadful fatality from poisoning.

Gosh. And I sent two bellmen into all parts of the borough to give warning to

all persons not to eat these lozenges.

So you can imagine the panic. People were literally running through the

warning people. Ringing bells, shouting, they're poisonous.

And there was a massive amount. There was 12 pounds of arsenic mixed into 40

pounds of sweets.

Tragically, more than 200 people were poisoned and at least 20 died.

This fateful event led to the Pharmacy Act of 1868, which limited sales of

poisons to qualified pharmacists and druggists.

So now, instead of anybody being able to set up a chemist shop and sell whatever

they like, it has to be highly regulated.

So in order to practice pharmacy, you have to be a member of the

society.

The Pharmacy Act also required chemists and druggists.

to clearly label all poison and drug.

So this, in a sense, is the beginning of the sort of organised pharmacy.

Exactly, and it's regulations like this that help build the public trust in

pharmacy that we have today.

Thankfully, the medicines in our factory... are fully approved for human

consumption.

And they're tested and checked at every stage to ensure they're safe.

I tell you what, it's all happening here. Look in here.

I don't know what tablets they are, but I say it must be a nightmare working

here. You can never fall in sick.

Although, given the staff here can't just help themselves.

If they do have an headache, they still have to nip out to the chemist.

We're 35 minutes in, and at the start of the production line, my batch of zesty

medicine is added to the honey and sugar lozenger mix, which is still a sizzling

130 degrees Celsius, before it emerges fully combined in all

its sticky splendour.

All right, well, I could stand here looking at that pouring out of there all

day, and I can just see through there, Rich, it's getting formed into a sheet.

Two glossy rivers of lemon and honey mixture are created by rollers that

the mix to 10 millimetres thick.

Yes, that looks gorgeous.

Love it.

This flexible strip is then repeatedly folded over to create a gradually

ribbon of gold.

Starting to bring the temperature down so it's malleable, ready for forming.

The metal conveyor is sprayed with warm water from underneath, maintaining a

steady temperature of 45 to 55 degrees, which slowly cools the lozenge mix to

80 degrees Celsius.

So I'll snap you a piece off and then you can get a feel.

Oh, get that.

But of course, health and safety won't allow it.

Spoilsports.

My stretchy strand of lozenge now heads uphill towards a pretty noisy part of

the factory.

Oh, look at that.

That's the snake that you've seen on the boat?

Yeah. So the lozenge mix is transporting into what we call the batch former.

That's amazing to look at that.

There's four cylindrical rollers building it all up, starting to stretch

size it down for the next stage.

The batch former is stretching the mixture like a sticky sugary dough,

it round and round the roller to make sure it's flexible enough to be moulded

into a lozenge.

Yeah, it's getting thinner as it goes down, isn't it?

The rope of honey and lemon is 9mm thick.

As it snakes off, the roller's towards an intriguing -looking piece of kit.

This is the moulding machine.

So the rope comes in at the bottom.

Inside the moulding machine, the rope passes into a circular metal die with 68

sets of sharp top and bottom teeth.

They close on the rope.

simultaneously cutting the individual lozenges and moulding them into the

correct shape.

Then, out of the machine, hurtle 8 ,300 lozenges every minute.

Wahey!

Look at that!

I absolutely love that machine!

Like a machine gunner brought lozenges.

How was the form?

Can I get some off? Yeah, have a go.

Get on there.

Hey, look at that.

All them lozenges.

So as you can see, Paddy, that's a fully formed lozenge, but it is still really

soft.

And this machine, what we're firing them into, is called the cooling conveyor.

As they travel through the enclosed cooling tunnel, the temperature of my

squidgy lozenges is reduced from 80 degrees... Oh, the way I can see them

going down there.

Ah, yeah, they are.

..to around 33 degrees Celsius.

So this is the end of our cooling tunnel.

We can get a sample off at this point.

So this is our finished lozenge. Do you want to feel that one, Paddy?

Rock hard, ready to go.

No squashing them whatsoever.

So every hour, we can produce one million lozenges in the hour.

Really? I didn't know there were that many people in the UK with sore throats.

That is a fantastic pub fact. Thank you very much, Richard.

I will bid you farewell, and I'm going to take that back with me.

Every day is a school day.

Well, unless you're poorly, of course.

Speaking of which, remember when you were a kid, you weren't feeling well and

your mum and dad would stick that big glass thermometer under your tongue?

Or Terry's just finding out how they work.

I'm in Cumbria, on the western edge of the Lake District.

Home to thermometer manufacturer, Brannan.

They've been making these traditional instruments since 1913.

Manufacturing director, Juliet Taylor.

Juliet, lovely to meet you. Hi, Sherry. It's overseeing their production.

Do people still use glass thermometers?

Yes, they're used in schools for experiments in their laboratories,

the NHS and other industries.

For safety reasons, we don't put glass thermometers in our mouth anymore.

But one of the company's most popular products is still the 305mm glass

laboratory thermometer.

Where does the thermometer begin its life?

It begins as a lens of glass.

Produced overseas, the tubes are made from toughened glass, which won't crack

high temperatures.

And they already have a tiny channel inside, ready for the thermometer's

That is a very, very tiny hole. How big is it? It's about the size of a human

hair.

I'm amazed it can even get up it.

Well, you'll see that it does.

It better do. Yes.

But first, the glass rods must be cut down to size.

The tubes are rolled over flames at 1 ,600 degrees Celsius, melting the glass.

And as it's heating it up, it's pulling it apart.

The rods are divided in two and sealed at the bottom, which is then expanded to

create what is known as a bowl.

So from here you can see that it's blowing the air.

I'm making the bulb. So this is like a teeny tiny little glass blower. Yes, it

is. Yes.

With their newly formed bulbs, the thermometers are now ready to be filled

one milliliter of the all -important liquid that will read any change in

temperature.

Pop that one in there.

All right.

In it goes. We fill this with our low -tox liquid.

What is low -tox liquid?

It's a kerosene -based liquid that has been used to replace the mercury that

we're used to use.

Mercury is very stable and consistent when heated and was used in the first

thermometer invented by Dutch physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1714.

Why don't we use mercury anymore?

The vapours off it would affect your brain function.

So it was deemed to be a poisonous substance and it was banned in 2014.

The kerosene used today is a safer petroleum -based product with a low

point and a high boiling point.

It's poured into a bath beneath the tiny holes in our thermometers before they

are placed into a vacuum chamber.

Inside, the air is sucked out of the tubes, forcing the kerosene mix up into

bulbs. where it's held in place because the atmospheric pressure is greater on

the outside than on the inside.

It's like a magic trick.

Look at that.

That's absolutely incredible.

The bulbs are heated to 70 degrees Celsius, vaporizing any excess liquid

the tubes.

The tops are then heated again to 1 ,200 degrees Celsius, melting the glass, and

forever sealing the liquid inside.

But how do thermometers actually work?

Quality control manager Jonathan Henderson... Nice to meet you, Jonathan.

Hi. ..is in charge of calibration, or making sure the thermometers are reading

temperature correctly.

At the moment, we've just got a glass tube with some liquid in it. How do you

turn this into a thermometer?

We need to create a reference point on the glass tube.

To do this... the kerosene liquid must move up the inside of the thermometers.

And this is done by placing them in a temperature -controlled bath.

Why does the liquid expand up the tube?

So as the liquid is heated up, there are little tiny atoms inside there, and as

they are heated, they become more energetic.

So it's all about the atoms getting hotter, more excited, expanding, and

coming down when it's cooler.

Yep. The bath water is set at 20 degrees Celsius.

and the kerosene rises up the glass tube.

But due to variations in each piece of glass, it will rise to a different level

in each thermometer.

And once the liquid stabilises, we're able to mark each thermometer.

This engraved mark accurately records each individual 20 -degree reading.

Counting me very, very carefully.

Like that?

Yeah.

Perfect. That's enough.

Great. Oh, contributed to science. Look at me.

When these marks are complete, they provide the exact position for the

temperature scale, which is added to each thermometer using a silk screen

printer.

Oh, there we go. How do you feel about that one?

Perfect.

After a quick blast in an oven to fire the ink into the glass, our thermometers

are finished.

Ooh, look at that.

Oh, look.

I've just been warming it up with my fingers and it's moving.

I mean, it's like it works.

You would hope so, right?

Where is this going to end up? So this could go anywhere in the world. We sell

them to 130 different countries around the world. A well -travelled

Hopefully, yeah.

Back at the medicine factory, I'm on the move too.

Lovely stacking.

I'm turning from lozenges to tablets at the ibuprofen production line.

My word!

This is proper industrial in here. I didn't expect it to be this noisy if I'm

being honest.

In the mixing room, process development manager, Catherine Stanifor, is getting

ready for the next batch of painkillers.

This is massive, this room. Very high -tech in here. It is quite high -tech.

what I need you to do, though, first, is put some gloves on, please. Oh, if you

don't, right.

So, ibuprofen.

What's the difference between a paracetamol and an ibuprofen? Because I

know which one to buy.

Right. Both of them are painkillers, right? But they both work in different

ways. So paracetamol actually works by blocking pain receptors in your brain.

Yeah. What ibuprofen does, say you twist your ankle or sprain your wrist. Yeah.

What your body does is it produces chemicals that cause inflammation where

that's happened.

And the ibuprofen in your bloodstream, they'll reduce those chemicals. You

reduce the inflammation, you reduce the pain.

And so it works in a different way to paracetamol.

Ibuprofen powder is sieved along with the disintegrants that help break down

tablets in your stomach.

And bulking agents that make the tablets easier to handle for both factory and

consumer.

The powders are combined with Brian Mason at the controls.

before he drops the mix into my mega ball.

And you're going to need a bit of muscle now, because we're going to need you to

rake this forward.

OK. The reason we rake this is because we want it to be flat when it goes into

the dryer. I'm looking forward to this. Right.

OK, Brian, off we go.

Go on, Brian, release the Kraken.

Oh, here it comes.

Oh, here we go.

Look at that.

Blimey.

That does come out quick, doesn't it?

You're having a field day up there, Brian, aren't you?

He's working me.

Yeah, a little bit more.

Are you all right? Get the sweat on. For God's sake, Brian, slow it down.

I'm not a machine.

You need to get going there, Paddy. He's gone mad.

Okay, just a little bit more.

Oh, it's no good talking to Brian. He just keeps going. He's a machine.

I think I need a couple of spoonfuls of this myself.

At this stage, it looks quite coarse as to what it looks like when you break

open a tablet normally. Yeah, it is a bit different to that at the moment.

got some more stages to go through.

So we'll do a snowball test on here because this will show us we've got the

right kind of consistency here. You say snowball test?

Yes. I thought that's what you said.

You form a snowball, right?

If it was too wet, you wouldn't be able to form this. If it was too dry, you

wouldn't be able to do it. Can you snap it in two like that?

Ah. And that shows us that we've got a good granule here.

So that's a good one, that. If it had all crumbled out your hands, it wouldn't

have been right. Yeah, exactly.

Do you want to get that in and I'll get over here? We'll have a little bit of a

snowball fight. No, we won't do that in here.

No, no, no. I can't lose anything out of here.

And the mix here, because we've done all this mixing now, this basically ensures

that we will have 200 milligrams of ibuprofen in every tablet when we make

Got you.

We've got to dry this off now, next. Right, let's get it dried off. Yes.

Any chance we can put Brian in that dryer? No, we can't.

The mix still has 36 % moisture, so it's attached to a huge dryer that takes it

down to 1 .5%. Then the dried granule is ready to

be transformed into tablets.

Can I get that door?

This is our compressing machine.

18 of these machines in the factory.

That's going round pretty sharp, isn't it? It is going round pretty fast.

In fact, it's too fast to see what on earth's going on.

Our granule is now sitting above us. It's in one of the big bins, and it's

gravity -fed right down into the back of the machine to fill up the punches,

they're called.

We've got 45 of these upper and lower punches. They rotate round.

and pick up some of the granule then what happens is a great big load of

slams it all together basically about one ton of force and that slams it

together and that tablet is formed it's got its shape then and is that then

finished then not quite i was just going to say because they've got a shine on

they look smooth but when you feel them you can still feel a little bit chalky

yeah you can so we've got one more stage after this lead on captain

the tablets are transported to what looks like a faith -age laundrette.

Look at this.

Can I introduce you to Barry, our operator in here?

Oh, you're very nice to meet you. So what we've done, we've taken the tablets

and we've put them into these five coating cans.

And they're crumbling round at the moment.

And we're going to add some sugar syrup to them. Is this the sugar solution that

goes on it?

Yes, so that's a mixture of food growth and water.

Right. And we're going to apply that to the tablet.

And there's two reasons why we do this. Because ibuprofen is actually very

bitter. Right. So that helps it to be swallowed.

And also the smooth shell that's on there will help it to be swallowed as

Weirdly, now that you've said it, when I've put one in my mouth, you do get

little bit of sweetness. It just makes it a little bit more pleasant.

Absolutely. And we're going to add some more sugar syrup to it to help build up

the taste of the tablet.

It's not dry. No, no, no.

The sugar coating is gradually built up across six to eight

hours, with a total of 20 jugs slowly added to each pan to make the tablets

sweeter, smoother and rounder.

I'll look at these for six to eight hours, and I'll see you in a bit.

I'll make sure every single one's got an even coating on.

I might need one of those buckets back here. I'm feeling a bit clumsy.

After a serious amount of tumbling, my sugar -coated tablets are getting ready

for a bit of a bounce around.

Here we are, Paddy. Ah!

Here's our finished tablet.

Looking very nice and shiny.

The

tablets

are vibrated into snuggly fitting trays.

Where they're held in place as a rubber roller covered in food safe ink prints

the product name.

and tablets per hour at the moment?

The numbers are just mind -blowing. They are.

Then they're checked by a close -up camera before being plucked out of the

by suction cups.

You can see here now, we've got these nice, shiny tablets.

Yes, oh, they look great, them, Catherine.

Would you like to know a fact about either person?

I would love a fact about ibuprofen.

Ibuprofen was actually invented here in Nottingham.

Do you know who else knows that? Who? A very lovely lady called Ruth.

Over to you.

To you. To me.

To you.

The year is 1953.

Queen Elizabeth II has been crowned at the age of 27.

Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing have become the first to conquer Mount

Everest.

And here in Nottingham, a small team of British scientists are about to embark

on their own incredible journey.

This unassuming Victorian house was their rather unlikely laboratory.

To find out more, I'm meeting Professor David Adams.

Hello Ruth, nice to meet you. A scientist himself and the son of one of

pioneers. I have to say this seems a rather suburban location for a

pharmaceutical story.

It is, isn't it? Very different to a modern pharmaceutical research

So why on earth was your father working in a suburban house?

Well, he was a scientist working for Boots, the Boots Pure Drug Company, as

were then called. This was just after the war, so a lot of their departments

been evacuated out of the centre of Nottingham because of the bombing.

And the research department was relocated to this house down by the

I'm ashamed to say I've never been here before, so this was quite an experience

for me.

Shall we go and have a look?

Yes, let's.

By the early 1950s, Boots was not only an established high street brand, but

begun making pharmaceuticals.

The former owner of the company, Jesse Boots, was a sufferer of rheumatoid

arthritis, an autoimmune disease that causes painful inflammation of the

31 years after his death, Boots gathered some of their brightest minds,

including David's father, Dr. Stuart Adams.

in this unlikely laboratory.

Oh, goodness.

And tasked them with finding a cure for the debilitating condition.

You can't believe it was ever a research lab, can you?

No, you really can't.

I think this is where the original laboratory was, and then they extended

the larder and the kitchen when they needed more space.

Remarkable, isn't it? Extraordinary.

That's my father working away, and that was taken here.

I mean, it looked even more domestic then than it did now.

I don't even know what this equipment is. It appears to be a hot plate, some

agar plates.

It's not exactly high -tech, is it? No, no, it definitely wasn't high -tech.

The house wasn't perfect, even succumbing to regular flooding.

But David's father and his team set about testing thousands of chemical

compounds in the search for a cure for arthritis.

Dad wanted to find something which suppressed that inflammation, which he

thought that inflammation was closely linked with pain. And one route to do

was to focus around aspirin.

Discovered in 1897, aspirin had been used with some success to target the

of arthritis.

And Dr Adams was convinced a compound in the same chemical family might hold the

key to the cure.

They tested a whole range of compounds, and unfortunately, none of these.

had the kind of anti -inflammatory activity they were looking for.

So they had to change tack, and they looked at a different series of

Six years after starting their research, Adams and his team had to begin their

search again, effectively from scratch.

I mean, it must have been so frustrating to just keep going, this one, no, this

one, no, this one, no, over and over.

Yeah, research is a slow and can be very frustrating process.

But in 1961, the team struck gold, discovering the drug that we now know as

ibuprofen.

Although not the cure David's father was looking for, thanks to its anti

-inflammatory properties, it provided much -needed pain relief to arthritis

sufferers.

And in 1969, the year Concord first took to the skies,

This new miracle pain reliever finished eight years of clinical trials and was

finally made available under the brand name Brufen.

Sophie Clapp is in charge of Boots' vast archive.

Brufen was launched as a prescription -only drug in 1969. It really put boots

the map in terms of a pharmaceutical researcher. So we absolutely wanted to

people aware of this incredibly effective drug.

But David's father didn't stop there.

He saw much wider potential for this new wonder drug.

It was tested as a treatment for sports injuries.

So he worked closely with Oxford United Football Club. It was tested for dental

pain. It was tested as a treatment for period pain.

In 1983, and 30 years after Dr Stuart Adams

began his research in that suburban house, the Department of Health approved

sale of ibuprofen over the counter under the brand name Neurofen.

It meant that it became an absolute stalwart of everybody's home medicine

cabinet. And how big a deal is ibuprofen worldwide?

So within five or six years, we were selling it in 90 different countries.

proof of the pudding being in the eating.

Did your dad use ibuprofen?

Yes, he did.

You couldn't have a headache in the Addams household without being given

ibuprofen.

He was very proud of what he'd achieved. But he always felt that...

he'd been a slight failure because he set out to find a cure for rheumatoid

arthritis and he discovered a drug that has been really helpful in treating

rheumatoid arthritis plus a host of other conditions but he didn't find a

but i don't think he did too badly really did he you

can say that again eight billion

ibuprofen are made at this factory every year

While the painkillers are being boxed up, I'm heading to see my honey and

lozenges.

But before they get their packaging, area team leader Mark Watkins is doing

final checks.

Hey, Mark.

How are you, Paddy? Hey, Paddy, all right? Yeah, good.

What's this lad doing?

This lad is our fat operator.

If there's any fat lozenges in there, then we'll move it out and put a good

in. What's a bad lodginger? A bad lodginger is anything with a chip.

And if you fancy it Paddy, you can have a go yourself.

What's the other one?

So if you take a handful of our good lodgingers Paddy. There's a good one.

Anything you see with a chip, flick it out and I'll put a good one in. Right,

here we go.

Get in here.

Oh!

Hey, get out, you little rat. Get out! Hey!

Oh, there's another one.

Get out.

Where, where, where?

Where were you, Matt? You're supposed to be winged, Matt.

There you go.

Oh!

I felt as though I were back at the bingo walls when I was a kid, though,

my mum.

Two dollars, one of each hand. Gibbers and dollars.

Love that.

I'll leave it to the expert.

A clever camera catches any defects missed by the human eye, especially

Then they're dropped into plastic blister packs before being sealed with

And the packs are cut into sections containing 12 lozenges.

The perfectly formed blisters are coming down the plating line now. Look at

that. Beautiful.

Why blister packs?

Because the medicine has to keep the integrity of the product exactly as it

when it was first packed.

You can pop one of those out and all the ones around it stay perfectly sealed.

Well, let's just do that.

Here we go. Big moment.

Oh.

Lovely pop on that, Mark.

The rest is sealed up like a little medicine advent calendar, that.

And there it is.

Ready to go. Ready to soothe.

Beautiful, that.

Lovely. Thank you very much. Cheers, buddy. Bye -bye.

Two field packs are stacked together. An

instruction leaflet is added.

with the correct dosage clearly listed.

And the flat box is date stamped before everything is dropped inside.

Then it's off for one last round of tests and safety checks before they join

ibuprofen at dispatch.

And at last, I can change out of my PPE Santa suit.

You all right, Paddy?

Sorry? It's Rich.

I've just been showing you around the factory.

My God, I didn't recognise you with your clothes on!

How are you, Rich? I'm all right, thank you. You? Yeah, all right. Loaded up. It

looks to me like we've got a mixture of ibuprofen and fraught lozenges on there.

That's right.

On each pallet of lozenges, we've got 6 ,450 individual lozenges.

And on each pallet of ibuprofen, we've got 16 ,800 units.

So... Hey, excuse me.

So how many individual tablets and lozenges are on there, then? So that

will take 58 different pallets. Yeah. So all together, we can do 4 .5 million

lozenges and 7 .8 million tablets.

Even for this programme, that's a lot of big numbers.

And get this, with seven lorries leaving every day, that's 31 .5 million

lozenges and 54 .5 million tablets.

So I presume in winter that number goes up, because that would be your busiest

time, wouldn't it, winter?

Yeah, winter's busier for cold and flu, but as a business we're produced in both

the southern and northern hemispheres. Right. So when it's summer here, it's

winter somewhere else. So it means we're busy all year round.

Constantly going with it. Correct, yeah.

Well, Rich, thanks for showing me around, pal. I thoroughly enjoyed

and get yourself a well -earned cuppa.

Cheers, Paddy. See you in a bit, bud.

Right!

Can I have no more?

8 hours and 35 minutes after the start of production my cold and flu medicines

are heading out of the factory to soothe sore throats and ease aches and pains

across the world.

As a lot of people with the lurgy will soon be feeling better.

And after I've done one last lap around my favourite factory doors, I

just need to round up the crew who like to peel off their PPE at the

end of a long day.

For God's sake, put your clothes back on.

Bring me sunshine in your smile.

Bring me laughter.

With new games, fabulous famous faces and Michael McIntyre at his mischievous

best, the big show is back on iPlayer.

Starting now on BBC4, the profile of John Logie Baird, the man who saw the

future and invented television.

Heading to the school with Manchester in its DNA next tonight, Waterloo Road.