Caroline Gardner and Woodmansterne on screen tonight with Channel 5 and BBC2
Tune in to the tv tonight to find out all about Christmas – and Christmas card production – as there are two programmes showing featuring publishers.
The first is Secrets Of The Christmas Factory, a brand-new Channel 5 programme taking a look at festive trees, brussels sprouts, Christmas cards, tinsel, jumpers and gingerbread with Caroline Gardner Publishing telling the greeting card part of the story.
The London-based publisher, which is celebrating 30 years in business and also has its own retail store on Marylebone High Street, was the centre for filming back in October with the first showing of the episode tonight, 15 December, at 6pm on Channel 5.
Then at 9pm over on BBC2 there’s another chance to catch Inside The Factory: Christmas Cards, which was first shown in December 2021 and has become a firm favourite on the festive repeats – and there’s a clip available to watch below.
In the programme, presenter Gregg Wallace visits the Woodmansterne card factory in Watford, proclaiming how the family-run business is one of the UK’s largest greetings companies, that sends out 35million cards a year.
He gets stuck into all aspects of card creation, sketching a design, creating the aluminium plate for the print process, guillotining the sheets into separate cards, and the final shipping operation which takes the product across the UK and as far afield as Australia and Singapore.
Inside The Christmas Factory is another BBC episode featuring the greetings business, which can be found on iPlayer having been first released in 2016 and aired again a couple of weeks ago, where Gregg’s co-presenter Cherry Healey travels to south Wales to IG Design Group’s factory which produces over 400m metres of bestselling wrapping paper every year.
And historian Ruth Goodman discovers the explosive history of Christmas crackers – invented by London confectioner Tom Smith in 1847, and the brand still holds the royal warrant under the ownership of IG.
