READERS of The National will be “absolutely fascinated” by a new BBC documentary about the paper, according to its award-winning filmmaker and producer Sarah Howitt.

The National is set to star in a new two-part series called The Papers on BBC One Scotland, the first episode of which airs tomorrow night at 9pm.

In a podcast interview with our editor Callum Baird – available now on our website – Sarah said making the programme made her realise “it is enormously impressive what’s possible to do in 24 hours”.

The documentary crew were given behind the scenes access to the newsroom of Newsquest Scotland’s flagship titles (The National, The Herald and the Evening Times) – for a never-seen-before glimpse at how modern newspapers are put together.

“We wanted to show what it is like to work at a newspaper now, at a time where we all know it’s pretty difficult,” she says.

The two-episode series has three main storylines running through it: the countdown to Brexit and how the papers cover it, the transition between digital and print, and how the industry copes with budget cuts and redundancies. But the main focus is the staff of the papers.

“It couldn’t feel like the news,” she explains. “The news had to be in the background and the people and their stories had to be in the foreground. The cuts that were happening were the things that were affecting people’s day-to-day lives and affecting how the papers are made I suppose. There are lots of documentaries around about Brexit so it couldn’t be about Brexit. Brexit had to be in the background.”

“It’s all about who the people are … are the people in that room interesting? Is their job insightful? Are we going to see something we’ve never seen before? I felt we were.”

The show begins in September 2018 – with the launch of the Sunday National and Herald on Sunday after the demise of the Sunday Herald.

Sarah wasn’t sure whether it was going to be possible to get the access and honesty she needed from staff in the newsroom.

“When I came in the first hour I thought there’s no way this will work. I thought a room full of cynical journalists are not going to open up to me,” she said.

“But actually very quickly people were very honest and it’s often the case that if people are busy and they have a focus they forget the camera is there.

“I remember Andy Clark, the assistant editor of the Herald on Sunday, just being focused but also brilliantly able to turn to me and tell me what he was doing but just get on with it.”

She then faced the challenge of convincing the BBC that people would be honest on camera

when she pitched it to the broadcaster two days after filming the Sunday papers’ launch. “I think observational documentaries just don’t work if it isn’t proper access and I was so impassioned by what I’d seen over the weekend that I wasn’t rehearsed at all. I just kind of blurted out ‘yes absolutely, it’s going to be brilliant, the people are prepared to be honest with us…’

“Never in my life before have I known anything to be commissioned so quickly.”

THE first episode (titled Off Stone – journalistic jargon for when a paper is sent to the printers) tells the story of The National’s viral front page about being denied access to Theresa May’s press conference during her brief visit to the Bridge of Weir Leather Company.

We decided that, if the Prime Minister wasn’t willing to speak to us, then we would refuse to publish what she had to say. Our “blank” front page went viral and was reported on across the world, with more than 6000 retweets and 10.6k likes on Twitter.

Sarah described it as a brilliant moment in the documentary. “In terms of pure filmmaking that was brilliant for us because we weren’t clear what was going to happen. We went [to the press conference] in the rain. Our camera was so wet we weren’t able to come back to the newsroom, which is a bit of sleight of hand, you probably don’t notice that as a viewer but I literally was soaked to the skin having been out for hours. In the background you came up with this amazing front page.”

Viewers will also be treated to some colourful language – from Sunday National editor Richard Walker, whose creative swearing is one of the highlights of the show.

“I think Richard was always a character who was going to loom large, and he was very generous with us with his time from the off and he was just himself,” Sarah explains. “Other people took a bit of time to get used to us but he didn’t.”

The second episode (Banging Out, which refers to banging on the desks when a journalist leaves the newsroom for the last time) details budget cuts which primarily affected The Herald and the Evening Times.

“Donald Martin [the editor in chief] was incredibly open with us, and was from the beginning,” she says. “I would have struggled if we had not been able to represent the cuts. Buzzfeed cut huge amounts of journalists while we were there so it isn’t just newspapers.

“I think there’s a protection around a version of events these days and people probably appreciate honesty a bit more instead of being given a corporate version of events.”

What will viewers, readers, and the rest of the industry make of the show? How will they react?

“I hope that people watch it and feel like they’ve learned something. At this point, after you’ve been through a three-month edit, it’s really hard to be objective.

“I think for a reader – I always think about my dad or my in-laws, older people who regularly read papers – I think they’ll be absolutely fascinated to see how all this is pulled together.

“I think we’ve achieved what we set out to do. I hope it makes its mark.”

The Papers, Series 1, Off Stone – BBC One Scotland, 9pm Wednesday