What that was, what it cost, and where to buy it.
A companion screen for the forty chapters: the fact behind the scene you are watching, the real number behind the one on the telly, and the thing on the counter, in a panel that stays out of the way.
How it syncs, and why it is manual.
You tell it which chapter you are watching
From a list of forty. It takes one tap and it is the only setup there is.
And roughly where you are in it
A slider, or the timestamp if you have one. Within about thirty seconds is close enough.
It runs its own clock from there
Cards appear at their timecodes. Pause the programme and pause the panel.
If it drifts, you nudge it
Two buttons, plus and minus ten seconds. Everybody who uses it does this once and then forgets about it.
There is no microphone anywhere in this
We do not listen to your room to work out what you are watching. It would work. We are not doing it.
What a card actually contains.
| Card type | Example | How many a chapter |
|---|---|---|
| The real number | The farm made £144 in its first year, and here is the filing | Two or three |
| What that machine is | A Lamborghini R8, and why it is the wrong tractor for this farm | One or two |
| Who that person is | Charlie Ireland, agronomist, and what an agronomist actually does | Two |
| What happened next | The planning decision that came six months after this was filmed | One |
| The thing on the counter | Which jar that is, and whether it still exists | Three or four |
| The bit they cut | What the edit left out, where we know | One, sometimes none |
Why the buy-the-thing card is deliberately restrained.
Second-screen shopping has a very obvious failure mode: a panel that turns a television programme into a shopping channel, firing a product card every ninety seconds until the viewer closes it and never opens it again.
So the shopping cards are capped at four a chapter, they only appear for things genuinely visible on screen, and they say plainly when the thing no longer exists — which is often, because the programme is five years old and the shop has changed its range twice since.
The most-used card in the whole system is not a product at all. It is the one that says what the real number was, which suggests people are watching this for the same reason they watch the programme.
The other watching-along surfaces.
This is not the programme, and we cannot show it to you.
The chapters live on Prime Video and the rights sit with Amazon and the production companies. This panel runs beside the programme; it does not contain any of it, and there is no version of this that plays you an episode.
Second screen, questioned.
Because that is a permanent microphone permission in somebody’s living room in exchange for saving them one tap. It is a bad trade and we are not making it.
That is the only thing it is for. It is deliberately readable at arm’s length in a dark room, which is why the panel is set larger than the rest of this site.
Tell us. Eleven have been corrected so far and three of those corrections came from people who were there.
Yes. It has no idea whether the broadcast is live and does not care.
The same idea, without a screen.
A forty-second farm brief, read out by a speaker in a kitchen.
