Diggers

In the first episode of this supersized series, Gregg Wallace and Cherry Healey get special access to a factory that makes as many as a hundred iconic yellow diggers every single day.

When he was a boy, like many a mucky child in the sand pit, Gregg used to play with toy diggers. Now he's got special access to explore the extraordinary engineering processes that make the ultimate big kids' toy! The JCB factory in Rocester, Staffordshire is a cathedral to construction, covering 60,000 square meters, where cutting edge technology and a super skilled workforce take just 45 hours to make a digger from scratch. Gregg follows the production of their best-known model, the backhoe loader, so-called because it has a loader shovel on the front and a hoe arm for digging on the back. To construct these eight-and-a-half tonne beauties, the factory gets through 650 tonnes of steel, 170,000 bolts, 5,000 litres of paint and 236 miles of wiring each week!