Original subtitles

Hello. Today I'm at a factory...

Sorry, sore throat.

HE CLEARS 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.

It's like a machine gun of throat lozenges!

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 Healey is rounding up the ingredients...

I'm in search of honey,

uncovering the stomach-churning habits

of nature's hardworking heroes.

When a honeybee gets back to the hive,

it regurgitates its collected nectar.

Obviously, it regurgitates it.

..and our resident historian Ruth Goodman

is prescribing the shocking history of the local pharmacy.

You could buy arsenic, strychnine, cyanide.

Over the counter with no oversight?

And no prescription.

Wow.

SHE LAUGHS

This factory pops out an incredible 230 million

tablets and lozenges every single week.

Welcome to Inside The Factory.

Play the titles.

- You all right? - You OK? You all right?

Chaps.

Love these doors.

Get on that.

Lovely stuff.

I'm at the Reckitt factory in Nottingham,

where they make enough pills and 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 Nurofen ibuprofen.

Now, clearly I have no idea about making pharmaceuticals,

but I do know that this factory takes it very seriously indeed...

..because even me designer stubble's...

And this.

..got to be covered up.

Well, 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 -

yep, that's how we say it up North -

without some honey.

They get through 175,000 litres every year,

making lozengers to ease our scratchy throats...

..and I'm on my way to meet it.

Right.

Whoa! One more thing you need there, Paddy.

More?

What are they doing here, splitting the atom?

I tell you what, is this not

the worst Avenger you've ever seen in your life?

Meanwhile, the hero ingredient for my lozengers -

the honey - has been taken to the factory's high-tech

dust-free testing station.

Keep going, mate.

In this chamber of highly filtered air,

only authorised personnel are allowed in

to meet lozenger supply lead Richard Tagg.

- Ay up, Rich. - Hi, Paddy. - How do we do this?

Is it all...? I mean, it's all, er...

How are you, pal? Oh, 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. - OK.

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 classed as a medicine,

and you're only allowed up to 12 lozenges per 24 hours.

We use honey for flavour,

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.

Yeah, 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 lozengers,

it's got me thinking -

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 Pattrick is a serious bee boffin.

- Lovely to meet you. - Good to meet you.

- Welcome to the bee lab. - The bee lab. - Mm-hm.

- What are you actually studying? - So we're interested in

bee nutrition, bee behaviour, 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 them 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 -

from flowers during spring and summer.

What exactly is nectar?

So 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 the bee's 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 30mg 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 off-load its 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. - Of course.

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! 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.

Nectar 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 is actually in the hive.

There are 12 hives in this outside lab.

And apiary manager...

- Is that Mark? - Yes. Hello! - It is Mark!

..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. - Yes.

Each bee regurgitates nectar

from their honey stomach into their mouthparts,

where even more water evaporates.

They repeat this process to fully concentrate the nectar,

and they have one last trick to finish the job.

- The bees will continue to reduce the water content... - How?

..in the liquid by fanning their wings...

- Oh, wow. - ..to create an air flow 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. Well done, girls!

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,

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 see themselves through the winter,

the bees in a hive like this can produce

an additional 22 jars' worth of honey a year...

..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.

Yes.

- It 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. - Yeah, the lighting.

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 hermat...? What's the word?

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

- Oh, right. OK. - ..to keep the contamination away.

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 used liquid sucrose alone, it would crystallise

- and produce a gritty lozenge... - Yeah.

..whereas if we just used 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 lozenger.

The sweet mix then travels through a series of cookers,

heating it to 140 degrees Celsius,

removing 20% of its moisture.

If it continued to cook at those temperatures,

the materials would burn.

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

Normally, water is boiled at 100 degrees Celsius,

but 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 lozenger.

We've still got to add the medicine.

Where's that done?

So the medicine is made in dispensary.

That sounds very chemist-y, very pharmaceutical.

- That's right. - I like it.

Richard, it's been a pleasure, fella.

- I'll go and look at the next bit. - Cheers.

While Rich oversees my scorching hot mixture,

I'm off to meet technical director Dr Genna Buckley...

..who has a door with no airlock.

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

- Hello, Genna. - Hi, Paddy. - Nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you. - Are you OK?

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.

Just pop it on there.

Is it just anything...?

Anything electrical, I'm sorry, You cannot bring over.

No worries. All right.

Should've known this.

Yep, keep going.

We might be here for a while, Genna.

- Right. - Right. Is that everything?

- Yeah. - OK.

- Right. - One last thing - no cameras.

Genna. We need them,

so we can see it on the telly.

You can come over,

- but they need to stay over there. - Cameras can stay,

- and they can't come with us. - That's right. - Right, Dan the cam,

get over there, pal.

Luckily, the lads have some paparazzi lenses.

- Right. - Come on, then.

What a place this is.

THEY LAUGH

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 amylmetacresol. - Yeah.

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 antiseptics.

Next, we need some flavouring.

We have lemon oil and the peppermint oil

that helps it accentuate 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 Kathryn Walker of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society

knows all about.

Hello!

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

What sort of things are people coming to a chemist's for?

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...

And you can see from her sunken-in cheeks

that this is a depiction of somebody who's already addicted.

So this is saying a child is an opium addict?

Yes. Children were quite often given laudanum

as a soothing aid, to help them sleep.

And side by side with narcotics...

..were some even more sinister products.

And there's arsenic.

"All sorts of poisons constantly" available.

Yes, Victorians had a slightly different

understanding of poisons than we do.

You could buy arsenic, strychnine, cyanide,

all from your chemists and druggists.

Over the counter with no oversight?

And no prescription.

Wow.

RUTH LAUGHS

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 pastilles.

Now, you'd think that would be all right, wouldn't you?

Allenburys Throat Pastilles.

Diamorphine and cocaine!

Diamorphine actually is a cough suppressant.

- OK. - 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 plaster of Paris mixture. - Mm-hm.

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 streets, warning people.

Ringing bells, shouting, "They're poisonous!"

And there was a massive amount.

There was 12lbs of arsenic...

- Oh, my gosh. - ..mixed into 40lbs 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 practise pharmacy,

you had to be a member of the Pharmaceutical Society.

The Pharmacy Act also required chemists and druggists

to clearly label all poisons and drugs.

So this, in a sense, is the beginning of

the sort of organised pharmacy.

Exactly, and it's regulations like this

that helped 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.

Tell you what, it's all happening here. Look in here!

I don't know what tablets they are,

but I tell you, it must be a nightmare working here.

You can never phone in sick!

Although given the stuff here can't just help themselves,

if they do have a 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.

- Ay up, Rich. You all right, pal? - Hello, Paddy.

I could stand here looking at that pouring out of here all day.

And I can just see through there, Rich, it's getting formed

into a sheet.

# I'm walking on sunshine, whoa! #

Oh, look at this!

# I'm walking on sunshine, whoa!

# And don't it feel good?

# Hey! #

Two glossy rivers of lemon and honey mixture

are created by rollers that squash the mix to 10mm thick.

Yes, that looks gorgeous. Love it!

This flexible strip is then repeatedly folded over

to create a gradually thicker 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 45-55 degrees,

which slowly cools the lozenge mix to 80 degrees Celsius.

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

Oh, look at that!

Oh, that's good!

Oh-ho-ho! That is good, Rich!

Oh, and as I'm squashing it away there,

I'm getting a lovely waft of lemon and honey.

I really wish I could take this with me all day and just do this.

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

Spoilsports!

Woo!

I enjoyed that.

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 belt.

- 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 it and size it down for the next stage.

The batch former is stretching

the mixture like a sticky, sugary dough,

wrapping it round and round the roller

to make sure it's flexible enough to be moulded into a lozenger.

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 rollers towards an intriguing-looking piece of kit.

- This is the moulding machine. - Right.

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 lozengers

and moulding them into the correct shape.

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

Wahey! Look at that!

I absolutely love that machine.

Like a machine gun of throat lozengers.

Hours of fun.

- Can I get some off? - Yeah, have a go. - Get on this!

Hey! Look at that.

All them lozengers.

So, as you can see, Paddy, that's a fully formed lozenge,

- but it is still really soft. - Yeah. - 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 lozengers

is reduced from 80 degrees...

All the way. I can see them all going down there.

Ah, here 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. - That's it.

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 fact with me.

Every day's a school day.

Well, unless you're poorly, of course.

Speaking of which, do you remember when you were a kid

and you weren't feeling well, and your mum and dad would stick

that big glass thermometer under your tongue?

Well, Cherry'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, Cherry.

..is overseeing their production.

Do people still use glass thermometers?

Yes. They're used in schools for experiments

in their laboratories, throughout the NHS and other industries.

For safety reasons,

we don't put glass thermometers in our mouths any more.

But one of the company's most popular products

is still the 305mm glass laboratory thermometer.

Where does a thermometer begin its life?

It begins as a length of glass.

Produced overseas,

the tubes are made from toughened glass,

which won't crack at high temperatures.

And they already have a tiny channel inside,

ready for the thermometer's liquid.

That is a very, very tiny hole. How big is it?

It's about the size of a human hair.

I'm amazed liquid 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 bulb.

So, from here, you can see

that it's blowing the air and making the bulb.

So, this is like a teeny tiny little glass blower?

Yes, it is.

Yeah!

THEY LAUGH

With their newly formed bulbs,

the thermometers are now ready to be filled

with one millilitre 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 LO-tox liquid? - It's a kerosene-based liquid

that has been used to replace the mercury that we 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 any more?

The vapours off it would affect your brain function.

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

The kerosene used today is a safer, petroleum-based product,

with a low freezing 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 the 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,

vaporising any excess liquid from 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 then coming down when it's cooler. - Yep.

The bathwater 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.

I'm going to be very, very careful. OK.

- Like that? - Yep. - Yep.

- Perfect. - That's enough? Great. I've 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 silkscreen printer.

Oh, there we go.

- How do you feel about that one? - Perfect.

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? - You would hope so!

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. - Wow.

- A well-travelled thermometer? - Hopefully, yes.

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

Lovely stacking.

I'm turning from lozengers 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 Kathryn Staniforth

is getting ready for the next batch of painkillers.

- This is massive, this room. - It is.

- Very high-tech in here. - It is quite high-tech.

So, what I need you to do, though, first is put some gloves on.

- Please. - Okie-doke. Right.

So, ibuprofen,

what's the difference between a paracetamol and an ibuprofen?

Because I never know which one to buy.

- Right. Both of them are painkillers. - OK. - 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 the 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 bowl.

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 drier.

- I'm looking forward to this. - Right.

OK, Brian, off we go.

Go on, Brian. Release the Kraken.

Oh!

Here it comes. Oh, eh, up!

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?

Getting a sweat on?

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

- You need to get going there, Paddy. - I know! - Or it'll come out the back.

It's Brian up there. He's gone mad!

OK, just a little bit more.

Oh, it's not... No good talking to Brian.

He just keeps going. He's a machine. KATHRYN CHUCKLES

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

- All done. - At this state, 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.

We've 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.

- Did 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 of your hands,

- it wouldn't have been right? - Yeah. Exactly.

Do you want to get that end and I'll get over here?

We'll have a little bit of a snowball fight.

- No, we won't do that in here. - Oh, they won't mind, will they?

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 200mg of ibuprofen

- in every tablet, when we make it. - 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 drier?

No, we can't.

The mix still has 36% moisture,

so it's attached to a huge drier that takes it down to 1.5%.

Then the dried granule is ready to be transformed into tablets.

Do you want to get that door?

- This is our compressing machine. - Ah!

We've got 18 of these machines in the factory.

That's going round pretty, pretty sharpish.

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 being 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.

- Yeah. - They rotate round and pick up some of the granule.

Then what happens is

a great big load of force slams it all together -

basically about one tonne of force...

- One tonne? - ..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. - A little bit chalky.

Yes, you can. So, we've got one more stage after this.

- Lead on, Kathryn. - Come on, then. - Lead on.

The tablets are transported

to what looks like a space-age laundrette.

Look at this!

Let me introduce you to Barry, our operator in here.

How are you, Barry? Very nice to meet you, pal. You OK?

So, what we've done, we've taken the tablets

and we've put them into these five coating pans,

and they're tumbling around 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 sucrose and water.

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

And there's two reasons why we do this -

- cos 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 well.

Weirdly, now as you've said it, when I pop one in my mouth,

you do get that little bit of sweetness.

It just makes it a little bit more pleasant.

Absolutely. And we've got to add some more sugar syrup to it,

to help build up the coat of the tablet.

Blimey!

- As far back as you can reach. - Right in?

Yes, right in.

There she goes.

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 tablet sweeter, smoother and rounder.

- There we go. - There you go.

Every dr... I'll just go in and inspect me work a minute,

- Kathryn. - OK.

I'll look at these for six to eight hours, and...

- I'll see you later. - ..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 them empty buckets back here -

I'm feeling a bit queasy.

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 tablets.

- They've been coated. - Looking very nice and shiny.

# I just want to make the whole world bounce

# Bounce, bounce, bounce

# Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce

# Make you bounce, bounce

# Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce... #

The tablets are vibrated into snugly fitting trays...

# Make you bounce, bounce

# Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce... #

..where they're held in place

as a rubber roller covered in food-safe ink

prints the product name.

# Make the whole world bounce

# Make you bounce... #

So, they're being printed - about 460,000 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 moulds by suction cups.

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

Yeah, they look great, them, Kathryn.

Would you like to know a fact about ibuprofen?

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. - Hello, Ruth. Nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you.

..a scientist himself, and the son of one of these 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 department.

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 they were then called.

This was just after the war,

so a lot of their departments had been evacuated

- out of the centre of Nottingham... - Right. - ..because of the bombing.

- I see. - And the research department was relocated

- to this house down by the River Trent. - House!

I'm ashamed to say I've never been here before.

So this is 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 had begun making pharmaceuticals.

The former owner of the company, Jesse Boot,

was a sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis,

an autoimmune disease that causes painful inflammation of the joints.

31 years after his death,

Boots gathered some of their brightest minds,

including David's father, Dr Stewart 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 into the larder in the kitchen

when they needed more space.

- It's remarkable. - It's 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 this was to focus around aspirin.

Discovered in 1897, aspirin had been used with some success

to target the pain of arthritis.

And Dr Adams was convinced

a compound in the same chemical family

might hold the key to the cure.

Well, they tested a whole range of compounds

and, unfortunately,

none of these had the kind of anti-inflammatory activity

they were looking for.

- OK. - So they had to change tack,

and they looked at a different series of compounds.

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...is a slow - and can be a 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 Concorde 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 on the map

in terms of a pharmaceutical researcher.

So we absolutely wanted to make 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 Stewart Adams began

his research in that suburban house,

the Department of Health approved the sale of ibuprofen

over the counter, under the brand name Nurofen.

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.

The proof of the pudding being in the eating!

- Did your dad use ibuprofen? - Yes, he did.

You couldn't have a headache in the Adams 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 cure.

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 lemon lozengers.

But before they get their packaging,

Area Team Leader Marc Watkins is doing some final checks.

- Ay up, Mark. - How we doing, Paddy? - Are you all right? - Yeah, good.

- What's this lad doing? - This lad is our track operator.

If there's any bad lozenges in there,

he'll remove it out and put a good one in.

- What's a bad lozenger? - A bad lozenge is anything with a chip.

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

Watch and learn!

So, if you take a handful of our good lozenges, Paddy...

- There's a good one. - ..anything you see with a chip,

flick it out and then put a good one in.

Great. Here we go.

Get in here.

Oh! Oh!

Hey, get out, you little rascal!

- Get here! - Wahey! - Hey!

Oh, there's another one. Get out!

You missed one then.

- Where? Where? Where? - You missed it. It's gone.

Where were you, Marc? You're supposed to be my wingman!

- There you go. - Where? - Pick it up!

- No! - Oh!

I felt as though I were back at the bingo halls

when I were a kid there, with me mum.

- Two dobbers, one in each hand. - Dibbers and dobbers. Love that!

I'll leave it to the expert.

That is a skill.

I didn't even know he had any lozengers in his other hand.

- Under his hand. - That's bonkers.

Should be a musician.

Good sleight of hand.

- Sleight of hand. - He's fantastic, this lad.

Like a young Paul Daniels.

A clever camera catches any defects missed by the human eye.

Especially mine.

Then they're dropped into plastic blister packs,

before being sealed with foil...

..and the packs are cut into sections containing 12 lozengers.

The perfectly formed blisters are coming down the packing line now.

Look at that. Beautiful.

Why blister packs?

Because it's a medicine, you have to keep the integrity of the product

exactly as it was when it was first packed.

So, 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 moments.

Oh.

Lovely pop on that, Marc.

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.

- Nice one. Cheers, buddy. - Take care, mate. Ta-ra, pal.

Two sealed 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 my ibuprofen at dispatch.

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

PADDY WHISTLES

- You all right, Paddy? - You all right? - It's Rich.

I've just been showing you round 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. Right, loaded up.

It looks to me like we've got a mixture of ibuprofen

- and throat lozengers 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...

HORN HONKS

Hey. Excuse me.

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

So, that trailer will take 58 different pallets.

- Yeah. - So, all together we can do

4.5 million lozenges and 7.8 million tablets.

PADDY EXHALES LOUDLY

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 lozengers and 54.5 million tablets.

So, I presume in winter that number goes up,

because that'll be your busiest time, won't it? Winter?

Yeah, winter's busier for cold and flu,

but as a business

we produce to 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.

- You're constantly going with it? - Correct, yeah.

Well, Rich, thanks for showing me round, pal.

I've thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Go and get yourself a well-earned cuppa.

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

Right, send 'em off!

Eight 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.

That's a lot of people with the lurgy

who will soon be feeling better.

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

Oh! Ah.

..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 all the while

# Let your arms be as warm as the sun from up above

# Bring me fun, bring me sunshine

# Bring me love, sweet love

# Bring me fun, bring me sunshine

# Bring me love

# Hey! #