Who is behind Grand Illusions?
Grand Illusions came into being in 1996 over a bottle of wine shared by Hendrik Ball and George Auckland, who at the time were television producers with BBC Education in London. It was the very beginning of the Internet and the BBC was just starting to create an online presence. We had just made a tv series about multimedia for the BBC (‘This Multimedia Business’) and had created the very first BBC website to accompany a television programme. This Multimedia Business was the first BBC television programme to show the website address on screen, and while very few viewers write in to television programmes, the barriers to sending an e-mail are much lower, and we found ourselves answering questions from our viewers in a more direct way than we had ever done as traditional tv producers. When the programme was subsequently shown in other coutries around the world, as BBC Education programmes tend to be, we were amazed and charmed to be suddenly getting e-mails from India, Australia, United
