In a middling-sized suite on the second floor of a brick strip mall, above a health club and a jeweler, two brothers, their childhood friend, and a young recruit work to inspire children to go outside and explore the delights of nature. The office, nondescript except for some colorful cartoon decals slapped onto the walls, is in the northern Chicago suburb of Highland Park. Although the only greenery visible from its windows is a grassy curb and some planted trees and shrubs, this is the home of Nature Cat, an animated show that aims to teach kids about the natural world.

Nature Cat follows the adventures of the title character, a house cat eager to leave the confines of his home and learn about the world beyond. As he bumbles his way through forests and up mountains in his Robin Hood outfit, he is accompanied by a redoubtable mouse named Squeeks, an innocent dog called Hal, Daisy the fact-ready bunny, and Ronald the snooty cat.

“We were looking at our kids, and they weren’t going outside as much as we used to when we were that age,” Adam Rudman says. “Then there was that book written by Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods, which coined this term ‘nature-deficit disorder’ – a generation of children growing up with no connection to nature. We started thinking, ‘This would be a good idea for a show.’ But who would put on a show encouraging kids to get away from TV? PBS!”

Hal, Nature Cat, Squeeks, and Daisy. Image: Courtesy of Spiffy Pictures Adam, along with his brother David, is a creator of Nature Cat and a founder of Spiffy Pictures, the production company behind the series. The Rudmans had produced other children’s series, such as Jack’s Big Music Show for Nickelodeon and Bunnytown for Disney. Both brothers had worked on Sesame Street, David as a puppeteer (he still plays and voices the role of Cookie Monster) and Adam as a writer. But they and their business manager Scott Scornavacco had never before created a major animated series – their previous ones had used puppets and live-action – or produced a show for PBS, which operates differently from commercial networks.

But after they had created a pilot and before the show had been greenlit, serendipity intervened, bringing Spiffy someone with experience in both those areas. “I was in Boston at WGBH for five years, working in animation on Martha Speaks and Arthur,” Caroline Bandolik recalls. “But I’m from Wilmette,” a northern suburb of Chicago. “I just missed my family and was ready to come home. I had told my parents, I just have to leave Boston, I know I’m not going to have a job, I’m saying goodbye to children’s television, my life’s over,” she says in a mock-dramatic lament.

Luckily, a mutual acquaintance at PBS Kids connected Spiffy and Bandolik. “We were sold right away,” Adam remembers. Bandolik says that, “To be able to work on this show with these guys, all the stars just lined up perfectly.”

“For both sides,” Scornavacco chimes in.

Bandolik quickly emailed back the contact at PBS Kids and says she wrote something along the lines of “I just met the guys at Spiffy, they’re great! I really hope Nature Cat gets a greenlight. Smiley face!”

Scott Scornavacco, Adam Rudman, David Rudman, and Caroline Bandolik with Nature Cat. Image: Courtesy of Spiffy Pictures While they narrate the origins of Nature Cat, all four Spiffy team members constantly interject with jokes, reminiscences, playful jabs, and other flashes of humor and geniality. They probably make each other laugh every other minute. So it makes sense that the series is full of comedy and slapstick. “One of the greatest criticisms of our show that PBS got early on was, “It’s too funny! Tone it down!’” Adam recalls. “But they turned to us and said make it even funnier.

“We just do what we think is funny,” he continues. “We want children and adults to look at this and laugh. Especially because with this curriculum, parents need to be taught as much as their kids about the environment and how important it is to go outside and do stuff with your kids.”

Bandolik adds, “If the parents like it, they’re going to want their kids to watch it.”

A lot of the comedy originates with the voice actors, who are all comedians. Nature Cat’s pilot featured three of the main characters, voiced by Saturday Night Live stalwarts: Bobby Moynihan as Hal, Taran Killam as Nature Cat, and Kenan Thompson as Ronald.

“Then an agent called and said, ‘I keep hearing people on the SNL set talking about Nature Cat, would you consider one of my clients?’” David recalls. “This happened to be Kate McKinnon.”

“She was new on SNL,” Adam explains.

“We were in the process of trying to cast other people,” Scornavacco continues. “But Taran and Bobby kept saying you should look at her.”

“When we finally saw her, you could just see how great she was,” David remembers.

“We had tried other people, and it just never made sense,” Bandolik says. “As soon as she walked in with a couple ideas for voices, it was like, there’s the character.” McKinnon became the voice of Squeeks, and the cast was filled out by Kate Micucci as Daisy. (“I always loved her voice,” David says of Micucci, “so we just asked her.”)

Image: Courtesy of Spiffy Pictures Because the cast members all live in New York or Los Angeles, they record their voice tracks through Skype. While the actor is in a studio on the coast, Spiffy records them in an audio booth in Illinois, giving feedback and direction. “Skype has come a long way,” Bandolik says.

“The cast is just coming up with the funniest ideas ever,” Scornavacco says. “Half of them we can use, the other half we could never use, because it’s kind of crazy for kids’ TV.”

“The cast brings so much that you couldn’t write if you wanted to,” Bandolik says. David adds, “And they know their characters so well now. The characters just keep evolving.”

But Nature Cat is not just a comedy. It’s also meant to teach. So how does Spiffy ensure that the episodes do more than simply entertain?

“Frances and Jesse,” Bandolik succinctly states, and everyone laughs. “Frances” is Frances Nankin, and “Jesse” is her daughter Jesse McMahon, the series’ curriculum advisors and content producers. Frances, with whom Adam had worked while writing for the PBS Kids show Cyberchase, came out of retirement to work on Nature Cat because of her love of nature and her belief in the show’s mission. Each episode begins life as a brief written by Nankin and McMahon that outlines the lessons that should be taught.  

Image: Courtesy of Spiffy Pictures Spiffy and a writer then collaborate on story ideas, and the writer sketches an outline. (Spiffy wrote the first twenty or so episodes to “establish the tone and characters,” David says, but now they use outside writers.) As the fledgling episode goes through several drafts, PBS advisors review it. A Toronto-based media group called 9 Story then receives the script and designs characters, props, and backgrounds, all of which is overseen by Spiffy. The cast records the scripts, and 9 Story produces increasingly detailed animated mock-ups. Finally, about a year after work started on the eleven-minute episode, it is ready to air.

Spiffy manages the entire process, juggling up to eight scripts in different stages of the process at once. Their production schedule sprawls across an entire wall of Adam’s office like a massive, horizontal game of Tetris. But somehow they stay on top of it all, filling numerous roles. “I’m doing voices!” Bandolik exclaims. “I’ve never done that before. I’m now a digital expert. I do audio, if you need help with that,” she offers, tongue-in-cheek. “I get to do everything.”

This is Part 1 of a story about Spiffy Pictures. Stay tuned for Part 2, about David Rudman’s career as a puppeteer and the origins of Spiffy.

WTTW Great British Baking Show Drawing

It’s time to take to the tent, put on the aprons, and get ready to ‘wow’ Paul and Mary with signature bakes in a new season of The Great British Baking Show on WTTW!

To say thanks for watching, we’re giving away the ultimate Great British Baking Show fan prize package to one lucky winner:

• Seasons 1 through 4 of delicious series The Great British Baking Show;
• Two popular cookbooks - the new Mary Berry Cooks cookbook and Paul Hollywood’s British Baking Cookbook;
• a WTTW Cooks! Apron.

One lucky viewer will be selected at random to win this exciting prize! Hurry and enter before noon CT on Friday, June 30, 2017.

Enter today (* required fields): 

The Great British Baking Show returns tonight at 9:00 pm with a fourth season on PBS. Twelve new bakers assemble to take on Paul and Mary's challenges, tackling everything from botanical ingredients to Tudor recipes. If the beautiful cakes and pastries have you salivating, try some recipes from previous seasons of the show, courtesy of Mary, Paul, and contestants. 

Mini Victoria Sponges – Try a mini version of Queen Victoria's favorite dessert in a recipe from Mary Berry. 

Tennis Fruit Cake – Mary called this Technical Recipe "one of the most difficult challenges we've given our bakers," but draw on the inspiration of the fearless contestants and you can take it on.Photo: Love Productions

Raised Game Pie – This recipe of Paul's is for a quintessential British food: the savory meat pie. If game is not your cup of tea, try it with a more traditional meat filling.

Passion Fruit and Lime Charlotte Russe – Mel and Sue thought this classic dessert sounds "a bit like a film star from the 1980s." In fact, it's a custard surrounded by ladyfingers and topped with jelly.Photo: PBS

Toffee Apple Doughnuts – Richard impressed both Mary and Paul with these delectable treats in season 1. Try them yourself.

This September, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick present their new documentary – THE VIETNAM WAR. Ten years in the making, this film features testimony from nearly 80 witnesses including those who fought in the war, those who were against it, and the many other lives it touched in some way.

We would like to help you share your personal stories. Please fill out the form below to let us know you are interested in sharing your story, and we’ll be in touch with you soon!

My Mother and Other Strangers airs Sundays at 7:00 pm. You can stream previous episodes here.

In a provincial town in the British Isles during World War II, a married woman nervously enters into a flirtation with a foreign soldier. The men of his company, based nearby, are regarded with hostile suspicion by the locals. No, this is not Pat and Marek’s romance in the second season of Home Fires. It’s the new Masterpiece drama, My Mother and Other Strangers.

Great Paxford has been exchanged for the Northern Irish town of Moybeg, where locals gather eels from the gray shores of Lough Neagh and constant rain reduces roads to muddy ridges. The country existence is periodically interrupted by the roar of Flying Fortress bombers landing at a nearby American airbase, whose soldiers drive Jeeps into town searching for dates and beer.

Michael Coyne owns Moybeg's pub and grocery. Photo: Steffan Hill/BBC 2016 for MASTERPIECE The pub they frequent is owned by Michael Coyne, who runs the bar and an attached grocery with his wife, Rose. Rose is a bit of an outsider in Moybeg. She’s English and well-educated, with a love of Tennyson. Her sixteen-year-old daughter Emma and younger son Francis are being raised to speak “properly,” instead of with the rural grammar that Michael sometimes slips into. Emma is bookish and has her sights aimed higher than the small town. Francis is reserved and observant – he provides the retrospective voice-over that bookends the episodes.

A few virile soldiers decide to look beyond beer in order to lighten the dreary tedium of their lives, and attend a dance at the quaint parish hall. But their entrance immediately causes the music to halt and generates icy stares. Knowing when they’re not welcome, the soldiers leave – but not before the handsome Lieutenant Barnhill flashes a smile at Emma Coyne, and a gang of Moybeg men threaten a fight.

Barnhill later offers Emma and Francis a ride in his Jeep as the pair goes to collect eels, Barnhill’s eager countenance a contrast to the flat, drab landscape. After some nervous back-and-forth between a flushed Emma and a self-conscious Barnhill, he asks her to the movies and offers her a gift before driving off.

Hoping to continue the courtship, Barnhill comes to the Coyne house and requests permission from Michael to take Emma to the movies. Michael dismisses him and warns him not to think of it again. As teenagers will do, Emma defies her father and drives to town with Barnhill anyway. Once at the theater, however, she is upset that everyone seems to be there just to make out. She quickly leaves and a disappointed Barnhill follows. Trying to redeem herself, she kisses him in the car, but he realizes that she is simply attempting to prove her maturity, and he demurs, bringing her back home.

Frank Barnhill's interest in Emma causes trouble in Moybeg. Photo: Steffan Hill/BBC 2016 for MASTERPIECE Unfortunately, Michael is waiting for them, having been apprised of the date by a Moybeg lad who saw Emma and Barnhill drive off. Michael furiously confronts Barnhill, who responds with polite but intense restraint before returning to his base.

Meanwhile, Rose has met her own dashing American. She first encounters Captain Dreyfuss while walking on the shores of the Lough. Impressed by his sensitivity to the natural beauty, she is further smitten when he appears at the pub for advice on how to better integrate his soldiers into Moybeg, and casually quotes Tennyson. Their awkward conversation mirrors the flirtation of Emma and Barnhill, although neither of them yet acknowledges the attraction.

The way that Rose hides away a button from Dreyfuss’s coat found while out walking by the Lough does suggest that she is aware both of her budding affection and that she should keep it a secret from her husband. Her suppressed feelings are further confirmed when she discovers Barnhill’s gift to Emma and confiscates it, stowing it with the button: two tokens of forbidden romance, stashed together in a drawer. The situation helps her sympathize with her daughter and her beau, and when Dreyfuss appears at the Coyne home to again ask advice on how to build up good will, she refuses to divulge Barnhill’s name after reporting the incident between Michael and the lieutenant.

Neither Rose Coyne nor Captain Dreyfuss admit their feelings, but it's clear there is something growing between them. Photo: Steffan Hill/BBC 2016 for MASTERPIECE But Barnhill soon gets himself into more trouble. Scheduled to ship off to war in two days, he comes to the Coyne pub for one last drink. After getting drunk with the suddenly friendly locals, he begins to stagger back to base but first calls for Emma from the street. As she sneaks to the window, he is pulled into a barn by a gang of locals, who begin to beat him. Emma rushes to her father, who tries to break up the fight but is ignored. Then Rose appears with a shotgun, and Barnhill is released.

Dreyfuss again visits the Coynes to inform them that the American commanding officer has made their pub off-limits to the soldiers for two months. Before leaving, he hands Rose a note to Emma from Barnhill, who has shipped off. She accepts, but refuses to give it to Emma – she doesn’t want a cloud to hang over her daughter’s head if he dies in war, which he does a few months later. Thus one dangerous romance is ended, while another begins to bloom.

Grantchester airs Sundays at 8:00 pm. Previous episodes are available to stream here.

We’re almost as far as possible from winter, given that the summer solstice is Tuesday, but it’s snowing in Grantchester. Season 3 begins with a Christmas special, and the holiday leads to some predictable behavior from our pals Sidney and Geordie: lots of whiskey on Sidney’s part, and grouchiness from Geordie in reaction to all the cheer. Sidney has avoided one parish duty by ceding the nativity play to Leonard, who is attempting a Brechtian reimagining with the distractible children. There is a singular exception to the routine, however: Sidney must figure out his relationship with Amanda as she nears the end of her pregnancy with Guy’s child.

The groom of a wedding never shows up to the ceremony, and is soon found dead. Photo: Colin Hutton and Kudos/ITV for MASTERPIECE Oh, and after the groom of a wedding officiated by Sidney never shows up, he is discovered dead in his office with the safe cleared of money. Bill Davis was a wealthy older banker due to marry a youthful burlesque dancer named Linda. They met at a “country club” – that is, a strip joint. Bill’s son Felix never approved of the marriage and suspects Linda is a gold digger. His suspicion only deepens when Geordie and Sidney discover that the blonde Linda had a previous life as a married redhead. But that husband died of natural causes.

When Sidney and Geordie visit Linda at her workplace (there’s definitely a joke somewhere about a vicar in a strip club), they get the impression that her employer Larry Simpkins is preventing her from talking about something. So Geordie sends Phil in for some reconnaissance. Unfortunately for Phil, the women are good at their jobs. He gets smashed and Simpkins escorts him outside, stealing his wallet in the process. Geordie intervenes and brings Simpkins in for theft.

The interrogation of Simpkins is quickly interrupted by a more promising lead. Bill and Linda’s weddings rings were found shoved down his throat, an imitation of a crime Geordie investigated years ago. In that case, Gail Tannen’s fiancé was also found dead, with rings in throat, on the eve of his wedding. Geordie suspected Gail’s father, Albert, was the culprit, but he could never pin it on him and the murderer went uncharged.

But now Geordie has another chance to solve that cold case. With Sidney, he visits Albert at his toy shop and Gail at her home. The father and daughter are estranged, as Gail blames her father for the long-ago murder. Albert’s granddaughter Jessica, the child of that almost-marriage, has an interest in Albert, however. She frequently haunts her grandfather’s stoop, and Sidney introduces Jessica to Albert after nabbing her when a friend of hers throws a firecracker into the toy shop. While the appearance of his granddaughter brings Albert joy, it also further incriminates him: Jessica tells Sidney that Albert was away from the shop on the night that Bill Davis was murdered.

Sidney, Phil, and Geordie are led to Albert Tannen as a prime suspect. Photo: Colin Hutton and Kudos/ITV for MASTERPIECE Elsewhere in Grantchester, another father-daughter pair enter their own estrangement. With Sidney’s encouragement, Amanda has set up a meeting with her father at her Aunt Cece’s house, where she is staying in the wake of leaving her husband and being disowned by her father. But Eddie deepens his exile of Amanda by forcing Cece to stop housing her, leveraging the fact that both Cece’s son and husband rely on him for employment.

Too ashamed and proud to accept any more help, Amanda packs her bags and leaves with nowhere to go. Leonard finds her on a snowy bench near the rectory and insists that she come into the warmth. That offer becomes urgent when Amanda’s contractions begin. With the midwife and doctor both tied up by a breach birth, Mrs. Maguire is left to attend Amanda’s delivery.

Back at the toy shop, Sidney and Geordie have discovered a wounded Albert on the floor next to a slate with the message “Confess!” A young assistant of Albert’s is the culprit: Albert’s business is failing and he owes the boy money, so the boy thought he would give Albert a scare. While visiting Albert in the shop later, Sidney notices that one of his tools perfectly matches a gouge on the door of Bill Davis’s office. Albert is arrested.

Under interrogation, he maintains his innocence but grudgingly accepts that the detectives will never believe him. He disliked Gail’s fiancé because he caught the young man with another woman. And he damaged Bill’s door because the banker ridiculed him for asking for a loan. Left with this information, Sidney and Geordie learn that Amanda is in labor and rush to the rectory to wait it out with whiskey – three bottles’ worth.

It's a happy Christmas in Grantchester when Amanda gives birth. Photo: Colin Hutton and Kudos/ITV for MASTERPIECE Deep into the night – and the liquor – Sidney has an epiphany. The spurned lover of Gail’s fiancé, whom he left to marry Gail, is the murderer in both cases. What connection did she have to Bill Davis? She was his fiancée. Sidney catches the now brunette Linda on a bus out of town and brings her in. She killed Bill after they got in a fight, then took his money to hightail it and start a new life, just as she had after murdering Gail’s fiancé. Cleared of guilt, Albert and Gail reconcile, and he spends Christmas Eve with his daughter and granddaughter.

Sidney also spends the holiday with a new addition to his family: Amanda’s infant daughter. But there is still a pressing question, less easily solved than a murder: How will he and Amanda make this work?

The Story of China airs Tuesdays – June 20, 27, and July 11 – at 8:00 pm. Episodes are available to stream the following morning.

China is the oldest continuous state on Earth, dating back to the third century B.C.E. It developed the first printed money, movable type, gun powder, a magnetic compass, soccer, and many other innovations. Throughout history, its cities have been some of the largest and greatest on earth. Native ideas such as Confucianism and trade goods such as silk and porcelain have spread around the world. Today, it is a country of 1.3 billion people, a superpower once again rising to staggering heights.

“Europe is the size of China in terms of population, but it’s always been divided, except when it was under the Roman Empire,” says historian Michael Wood, the host of the six-part The Story of China, which explores 4,000 years of Chinese history. “Whereas China has got this incredible antiquity, in the sense of a culture. Even though it has many regional cultures and differences and dialects, everybody you speak to will say, ‘We belong to Han civilization.’ [The Han was the second imperial Chinese dynasty.] There is this sense that they are all part of the same thing.”

Michael Wood in Tiananmen Square. Photo: Mick Duffield Wood believes that in order to understand a country today, you have to first know its past, and the exceptional continuity of China makes such a claim especially true. Certain core values have guided Chinese civilization for millennia, and even after the relentlessly forward-looking decades of Communist rule under Mao, the Chinese people still venerate their traditions and history.

“I was amazed at how interested in their own history everybody was,” says Rebecca Dobbs, the producer of The Story of China. “I went there thinking that the Maoist era would have wiped it all out and nothing would be left. And yet everywhere you go, people were so keen to talk to you about their own history and show you stuff that they’d preserved or hidden, that they’d actually risked their lives to keep intact.” Wood adds that, since the Mao years, there has been an “amazing blast of modernity,” but there is still an “incredible tenacity with which the Chinese people preserve the old.”

Wood and Dobbs believe that it is vital in a historical series to tell an engaging story. “We all think of Chinese history as somehow being rather stable and going on and on for thousands of years, but actually there are these cataclysmic things that happen,” Wood says in his most dramatic voice. “Dynasties get pulverized and barbarians invade, and the most wonderful and glamorous civilizations on earth get totally destroyed.”

Spirit way at the Qianling Mausoleum, Shaanxi. Photo: Mick Duffield But all of this monumental change happens over millennia, and The Story of China is only six hours. “We couldn’t trundle through every emperor and every dynasty and everything that they did,” Dobbs says. “So Michael chose what I would call the nodal points, the turning points. We then go to the places where these happened, in the present day. You end up with the excitement of being in China today, and you see things that you don’t normally see on the telly, because most people just fly into Shanghai or Beijing to film and talk about pollution or financial markets.”

The Story of China is thus both history and travelogue. And producing it required a lot of travelling. Modern China is roughly the width of the United States, and takes around seven hours to fly over. Dobbs, Wood, and their crew made ten trips to the country over more than two years, spending two to three weeks there each time. Additional footage was shot by a Chinese crew while the team was editing in Britain.

“It’s massive, China,” Dobbs says. “The diversity of language really amazed me.” (She was also surprised by “how easy it was for me to work there as a woman,” she says. “I honestly think it’s the least sexist place in the world that I’ve ever worked.”) Whereas most people in Beijing speak Mandarin, 50 miles outside the city villagers might speak an entirely unfamiliar local dialect. “We were forever having to try to get a local who could speak the dialect and Mandarin, and then get it from Mandarin into English,” Dobbs says.

Street scene in Xi'an. Photo: Mick Duffield Neither Dobbs nor Wood speaks any form of Chinese, so they retained two Chinese-speaking employees in their London office, one of whom was the associate producer, Tina Sijiao Li. Li helped Wood work on his pronunciation for voice-overs in the show, although he regrets a few incorrect vowels that crept into some of the monologues he recorded in China. While he only picked up a few words and phrases, he jokes that, “I did learn a poem by my favorite Chinese poet, which, if I’ve had a glass of wine or two, I could give a really convincing rendition.”

Poems and firsthand accounts often provide narration in The Story of China. “I really liked reading from the diaries or letters of the peasant who rose up against the state or the emperor or whatever, because it is funny how you kind of recognize these ways of trying to persuade people,” Dobbs says. “We look for those corollaries that make you understand what’s going on in China.”

Such sources also provide the Chinese perspective. “You’re a foreigner making a film about another culture, you’ve got to put yourself in their shoes,” Wood says. “If you made a film about a foreign culture, and the people in that culture said that it was a waste of time, it wouldn’t really matter if people liked it on the BBC. It would be pointless if it wasn’t fair to them.”

Big Pacific airs Wednesdays at 8:00 pm, beginning June 21. Previous episodes are available to stream here.

A sea otter’s fur is so dense that one square inch of it could cover an entire German shepherd. Dolphins never fully sleep: one hemisphere of their brain is always awake so that they can continue to surface in order to grab a breath. Beluga whale calves are generally born tail first. Such fun facts spill easily and eagerly from Jessica Whiton and Tim Binder.

Both of them work at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, where Whiton is the supervisor of marine mammals and Binder is the executive vice president of animal care. Between the two of them, you can learn the amount of calories a Pacific white-sided dolphin at Shedd eats a day (30-40,000), how many pregnant beluga whales there are in North American aquariums (three, as of May), and how many gallons of water are in the habitats of Shedd’s Abbott Oceanarium (two million, made into artificial saltwater through a treatment called, no kidding, “Instant Ocean.”).

Bella the beluga whale at Shedd Aquarium. Photo: ©Shedd Aquarium The Oceanarium, which opened in 1991, models a coastal environment of the Pacific Northwest. It is populated by four major species: Pacific white-sided dolphins, which range across the Pacific Rim from Baja, Mexico to China; beluga whales, found in the Arctic and around Alaska; sea otters from California and Alaska; and Californian sea lions. All of these animals are apex predators or at least near the top of the food chain, so they are especially sensitive to ecological shifts such as chemical fluctuations or the population changes of other species in their habitats. They can therefore serve as a marker of the health of their ecosystem.

It is this status as a sort of ecological monitor that makes it important to maintain these species in aquariums, Binder says. It is much easier to study a dolphin or whale in human care than in the wild, so the techniques used by veterinarians to conduct physical examinations of these animals are developed in aquariums. Animals in human care are trained to undergo the physicals – because they voluntarily submit to the tests, their stress levels do not rise as a wild animal’s would, leading to more accurate readings. Those readings are then used as a baseline with which to compare findings from wild animals. If changes in the health of a wild population are observed, they may be a signal of a larger ecological problem.

The presence of these species in aquariums also allows marine biologists to closely monitor pregnancies and observe births, which are rarely seen in the wild, says Whiton. As a whale or dolphin nears the end of a pregnancy, twenty-four hour monitoring is set up from an observation room in the Oceanarium. In 2016, Shedd captured footage of the birth of a Pacific white-sided dolphin calf after three hours of labor.

Katrl gave birth to Kukdlaa in 2016 and Shedd captured footage of the birth. Photo: ©Shedd Aquarium Cetacean labor and postnatal care involves several difficulties that arise from giving birth in water. A calf must begin swimming almost instantly, in order to surface and catch its first breath. As Whiton starkly puts it, “If you don’t learn to swim, you die.” The calf must pair with its mother, who has to teach it to swim and to nurse. In the wild, all of this could occur in water with visibility of only a foot, or as the animals swim through massive waves. Faced with these challenges, Whiton says that, “First-time moms don’t know what they’re doing. They take a while to figure out how to teach their calf these survival skills.”

If cetacean calf-rearing seems difficult, however, sea otters encounter even more challenges. Almost all sea otters in aquariums were stranded or orphaned while young. Without a mother to teach them how to survive, these otters would die on their own. They are rescued by institutions such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium or the Alaska SeaLife Center, both of which are the source of Shedd’s sea otters.

Tim Binder with the rescued sea otter pup Luna. Photo: ©Shedd Aquarium Sea otters are kept warm in chilly water by their extremely dense fur – the thickest in the animal kingdom – so they must spend around four hours a day grooming their coat. If an otter does not keep its fur clean, it will die of hypothermia. But grooming is a learned behavior. In the absence of a mother to act as a teacher, trainers at Shedd must show the young otters how to groom instead, even using hair-dryers to help. But once those otters learn to groom, they can never be released back into the wild, for they still would be unable to survive on their own. As Binder says, “For sea otters, survival is not instinctual, it has to be taught.”

Shedd does have one sea otter that was neither orphaned nor stranded. While aquariums are prohibited from breeding otters, which are held under permits from the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife, one particularly ingenious female in Seattle ended up becoming pregnant after removing her contraceptive device. “It was a bit of a surprise,” Binder says. Her baby then came to Shedd. No matter how much humans try to monitor or train marine animals, the animals will always find ways to surprise and confound us. And when they do, the team at Shedd will be there, watching and learning.

This is Part 2 of a story about Spiffy Pictures. Part 1, about the origins and making of their PBS Kids series Nature Cat, can be found here.

David Rudman, the portrayer of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster and a co-founder of the children’s TV production studio Spiffy Pictures, constructed his first puppet in the fourth grade. “I made a sculpture for an art class out of a tin can,” he recalls. “And I thought, ‘It would be so fun if this could move. I wonder if I can make its mouth move and the wings flap.' I had so much fun turning it into a puppet and cracking people up with it that I just kept building them. A hundred later, I had a room full of stuff.”

A half-completed puppet by David Rudman. Photo: Courtesy Spiffy Pictures“I remember a lot of foam,” Scott Scornavacco says. Scornavacco is Spiffy’s business manager and a childhood friend of Rudman. “A lot of rubber cement. There were compartments all around your room, each with a few puppets.”

Rudman says that, “I would look at a Nerf ball and think, ‘I could make something out of that.’ I still have bags full of my early puppets in my attic, probably just disintegrating.”

As he tells it, puppet-making and performing were hobbies for Rudman that continued much longer than anyone expected. “I would do shows for birthdays and at school, and I just kept getting good support and encouragement from people,” he says. “So it was like, ‘I could stop doing this – or I could keep doing it.’ In middle school, I thought, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t do this anymore.’ But then someone asked me to do a show. Then I got to high school and it was like, ‘Alright, I’m in high school, I can’t do puppets.’”

Again, someone entreated a performance. The principal of the school gave his support, granting Rudman the keys to the auditorium in order to rehearse. At the end of the school year, he and a group of friends staged a revue for the entire school that included music and sketches. The production became a formalized, yearly event that Rudman put on every year of high school. “We would push the boundaries a little bit with some weird stuff,” he remembers. “My last two years it was really good. So I’m thinking, ‘I could stop doing this now. Or I could keep going and see what happens!’”

David Rudman braves a deluge of fake snow on the set of 'Jack's Big Music Show.' Photo: Courtesy Spiffy Pictures The summer after graduating from high school, Rudman auditioned at Jim Henson’s Muppet workshop in New York and received a summer job. As the summer dwindled, he made an audition tape for Henson. Two weeks into his freshman year at the University of Connecticut, he received a phone call asking him to come back to New York and meet with Henson, who had loved the audition tape. He was eighteen years old.

“I was ready to quit college,” he says. “Two weeks is enough.” But both Henson and Rudman’s dad advised him to finish school, working with the Muppets on breaks. When he graduated with a degree in acting and art in the mid-1980s, he therefore easily slipped into more work with the Muppets and Sesame Street. He now plays Baby Bear and several other puppets, and in 2001 he took over the role of Cookie Monster from the legendary Frank Oz when Oz entered semi-retirement.

In the early ‘90s, Rudman ran into an acquaintance in Manhattan who had just started working at Nickelodeon. Aware of Rudman’s work with the Muppets, she asked him to pitch some ideas for short vignettes to air between shows, called interstitials. His brother Adam had recently graduated from college with a minor in creative writing, and the two teamed up to create a short-form series named Hocle and Stoty.

Adam and David Rudman with Jon Stewart on the set of 'Jack's Big Music Show.' Photo: Courtesy Spiffy Pictures“We shot three test pilots in a studio,” David recalls. “I think I built all the puppets. It was really low budget and we just did it all ourselves.” The brothers made twenty-four episodes of the goofy series, which centered on two grotesque puppets wearing bowler hats. They also created a shadow-puppetry interstitial for MTV called Jean-Claude Lethargic that ran during Beavis and Butthead, and one for Comedy Central titled Life’s a Drag that featured cigarette pack puppets.

“We actually took real cigarette packs and put faces on them and bad teeth, and we put a smoke tube up them so that they were coughing and hacking,” David remembers, laughing. “Smoke would just billow out,” Adam says.

From there, the Rudmans moved into creating animated and live-action shorts for Sesame Street. David also got Adam an audition as a writer at the series, even though he had never written for a children’s show. At the end of three elimination stages, the only people left were Adam and the celebrated children’s author Mo Willems. Both of them ended up writing for the show. “That’s where I learned everything: how to write for kids, and adults, and families, and TV,” Adam says. “That was the beginning.”

In the early 2000s, the Rudmans finally got the chance to create a long-form project. Curious Buddies, their first effort, was a twelve episode direct-to-video show released by Nickelodeon in 2004. Filmed in the brothers’ home town of Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, it featured four main puppets interacting with live children. “Nick wanted to do their version of Baby Einstein,” Adam says.  

Doing puppetry for a TV show can get crowded. Photo: Courtesy Spiffy Pictures As they moved into long-form TV, the Rudmans changed the name of their production company from Rudling Productions to Spiffy Pictures. (“When we go into movies, we’re changing our name again,” Adam jokes.) It was at this time, too, that Scornavacco joined the team. “They just needed somebody to handle the business,” he says. “Suddenly the budgets are real, it’s not short-form stuff,” Adam explains.

Curious Buddies was followed by two more shows that mixed live-action and puppetry: Jack’s Big Music Show for Nickelodeon, and Bunnytown for the Disney channel. Then came the arrival of a young producer from Boston and the creation of the animated series Nature Cat for PBS Kids, which you can read about in part 1 of this profile. On June 19, they premiere their most ambitious project yet: a 44-minute Nature Cat special titled “Ocean Commotion.” Joking aside, movies may not be that far off – and it all started with a talking tin can.

Window To The World Communications, Inc., parent organization of WTTW and WFMT, announced today that Daniel J. Schmidt will retire as chief executive officer and president on December 31, 2017.

Schmidt joined the organization in August of 1991 as senior vice president of WFMT and The Radio Network, and was later appointed president and CEO of Window To The World Communications, Inc. in July 1998. For 26 years, Schmidt has led the organization’s strategic growth, solidifying its place as one of the most respected PBS member stations and revered classical music services in the country.

“Dan has skillfully and passionately steered WTTW and WFMT to significant success during his tenure. His sharp understanding of the rapidly changing media landscape has been instrumental to the organization’s strength and evolution,” said James Mabie, WWCI Board Chair.

Schmidt began his career in the broadcasting industry at WHA Television and Radio in Madison, Wisconsin in 1977. From 1979 to 1991, Schmidt held a variety of management positions at Minnesota Public Radio, including general manager of a five-station group. Upon arriving at WFMT, he developed an innovative non-profit/commercial hybrid business model; launched a national mainstream jazz radio format service; and expanded the WFMT Radio Network’s program distribution to international venues. Since assuming his role as President and CEO of WTTW and WFMT, Schmidt led the digital transition and formation of WWCI’s digital broadcasting operations center; spearheaded a successful $50 million capital campaign; secured $47 million from the U.S. Department of Education to launch WTTW’s entry into the PBS “Ready to Learn” initiative; and directed a significant increase in local and nation television and digital content production securing the organization’s place in public media’s formidable content distribution pipeline.

“I cannot imagine a greater privilege than leading WTTW and WFMT during a time of tremendous change and opportunity,” said Dan Schmidt. “I believe now more than ever in the essential role public media plays in serving the educational, informational, and cultural needs and expectations of our community. Today, our powerful brands are poised for the future, and I look forward to supporting WWCI and its new leader in the coming years.”

Schmidt has served on the boards of the U.S. Committee for UNICEF, American Public Television (APT), the Digital Convergence Alliance, Inc., the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He is past chairman of the Public Television Major Market Group LLC and the Illinois Arts Alliance, and served on the Public Television Affinity Group Coalition. He also served as a consultant for Chamber Music America and member of the Radio Broadcasters of Chicagoland. Most recently, Schmidt was named an Arthur Vining Davis Foundation Fellow for the 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival. In his retirement, he will continue his enthusiastic endeavors in boating and scuba diving, and spending time with his wife, three children, and four grandchildren.

WWCI Board Chairman James Mabie has appointed a committee of Trustees to oversee the search process for the next president and CEO of the organization.

About WWCI, Inc.
Window To The World Communications, Inc. is the parent organization of WTTW and WFMT. WTTW is the primary PBS member station in Chicago, committed to creating and presenting unique television and digital media content across distinct television and digital channels – WTTW11, WTTW Prime, WTTW Create/WTTW World, WTTW PBS Kids 24/7, and wttw.com. Recognized for award-winning local and national productions such as Chicago Tonight, Check, Please!, and 10 That Changed America, WTTW presents the very best in public affairs, arts and culture, nature and science, history and documentary, and children’s public media content. WFMT is one of the country’s most respected classical music radio services, showcasing superlative programs, concerts, and live events across broadcast and digital platforms. The WFMT Radio Network is a leading creator and distributor of audio programs about arts and culture that are made available to radio stations and other platforms around the world including Exploring Music with Bill McLaughlin and the Beethoven Network. 

With LGBTQ Pride Month in full swing and Chicago's Pride Parade happening on June 25, take a look back at this 1978 interview with one of the first American clergymen to publicly come out of the closet. Malcolm Boyd was an Episcopal priest with a public profile as a result of his activism in the Civil Rights Movement as a Freedom Rider and in the protests against the Vietnam War. He had also been associated with the LGBTQ movement and had spoken at Chicago's Pride Parade. In 1977 he came out of the closet, and the next year published the book Take Off the Masks about his experience. 

In this Callaway Interviews, he and WTTW's John Callaway discuss the "misuse" of religion in condemning sexuality, identity politics, consciousness-raising, and the importance of accepting difference and minorities while avoiding stereotypes. "We mustn't have some fundamentalists of any stripe somehow selling us on the idea that there is some kind of middle-American-majority morality, and that if one doesn't subscribe to it one will be flogged or burned or imprisoned or forced into closets," he says. "The majority loses its rights the moment it doesn't recognize the rights of minorities, because then one doesn't have a great society."

My Mother and Other Strangers airs Sundays at 7:00 pm. You can stream previous episodes here.

Eels, corned beef, books. These may seem mundane, but to the villagers of Moybeg they’re enviable luxuries. Eels are abundant in nearby Lough Neagh and a favorite food of the locals, but an eel company holds a monopoly on them and sends bailiffs to patrol the lake to enforce it. Under strict war rations, corned beef is impossible to get – young Francis and his friend Seamie have never eaten it. And for the ambitious Emma and Rose Coyne, books provide knowledge and vistas unknown in their simple rural hamlet.

To Emma, Barney is the exemplar of that unsophisticated existence. With Lieutenant Barnhill gone, Barney is eager to endear himself to Emma. He asks for a book recommendation from her, trying to interest himself in one of her main hobbies. But despite his attempts at reforming his quaint grammar and his newfound enthusiasm for reading, he remains a figure barely worth notice to the condescending Emma.

Corned beef is so rare under rations that Francis and Seamie have never had it. Photo: Steffan Hill/BBC 2016 for MASTERPIECE The appearance of a gentlemanly medical student named Andrew doesn’t help Barney’s chances. Emma is immediately attracted by Andrew’s refined manners and learning, and is soon cycling to meet him in the large town where his father, the local doctor, lives. After an admiring conversation and a peck on the forehead, he asks to see her again. Barney’s excited advances are instantly forgotten in Emma’s elation.  

Andrew came to Moybeg with his father, who was conducting a physical of the village rapscallion Davey Hanlon in advance of Hanlon’s appearance in court. Hanlon has been charged with assaulting an eel company bailiff after he and his friends were caught poaching eels on Lough Neagh. Davey threw the first punch and was saved from drowning by the bailiff after he fell off the boat, but he plans on testifying that the bailiff was the instigator and threw him into the water. He has the bruises to corroborate that claim, while the bailiff is perfectly unharmed – as a result of Davey’s poorly aimed swings.

But Davey and his fellow ne’er-do-wells weren’t the only witnesses. Francis and Seamie were also on the boat. The Hanlons trust Seamie to cover for them, but Francis’s moral upbringing worries them – and him, too, because he’s afraid to testify in court and unwilling to lie. He’s saved from the dilemma by habeas corpus. While he stays at home, his parents go to court to observe the proceedings.

The outlook is bleak for Davey, whose account of the crime is hard to believe. But Rose interrupts the prosecution to make a plea for justice, not on behalf of Davey – at whom she once pointed a gun in order to prevent him from beating a drunk soldier – but in defense of the entire fishing community. She cites the unfair charter of the eel company and the fishermen’s time-honored reliance on the lake and manages to woo the judge into a lenient sentence of a simple fine and confiscation of Davey’s eeling equipment.

Rose stands up for justice on behalf of Moybeg's fishermen in court. Photo: Steffan Hill/BBC 2016 for MASTERPIECE Rose’s informed knowledge of the legal battles over Lough Neagh is sourced from a book about the region given to her by Captain Dreyfuss. His request that Rose help alleviate tension between the people of Moybeg and his American airmen has become a transparent excuse for the two to meet and grow closer. Michael notices their friendship, but instead of being angry or suspicious, he asks Rose to use it to persuade Dreyfuss to shorten the ban on the Coyne pub. When she returns to her husband with a possibility instead of a certainty that it will be done, Michael even suggests that she should have flirted, raising an indignant Rose’s hackles.

That’s just one instance of marital strife between Moybeg’s leading couple. Rose disapproves of Michael’s stash of black market corned beef, which he received as payment of an American soldier’s bar tab. But when she confronts him, he defends his acceptance as driven by the unusual times. She in turn “disposes” of the tins, whose contents are later found feeding the dump-trawling family of Seamie.

Rose’s star moment in court further aggravates Michael, who feels that she made a fool of their family. Think what he will, Rose is now an admired idol in Moybeg – and she managed to shorten the pub ban to a fortnight. Keep up your small-minded orneriness, Michael, and you’ll soon drive Rose to Dreyfuss.

Grantchester airs Sundays at 8:00 pm. Previous episodes are available to stream here.

After the interregnum of the Christmas special, Grantchester returns to the issue of society’s treatment of people with mental challenges. (A running plotline of the second season focused on the trial of the challenged teen Gary Bell.) The murder victim this week is a Dr. Atwell. He is the attendant at a facility for the “feeble-minded,” and in his free time runs a soup kitchen. Killed while dispatching the duties of the latter position, he is discovered by the church caretaker, sprawled on the floor of a church, red tomato soup staining his chest and water leaking out of his mouth – he was drowned.

When Sidney and Geordie search Atwell’s home, Sidney recognizes a nurse in a group photo, although he can’t remember who she is. The bedroom holds a macabre surprise: a dead crow splayed on the mattress. This is an especially distressing omen for Sidney. When he returned to the vicarage late the previous night, the same sign was waiting for him in the kitchen. The ominous warnings continue when he gets a phone call filled with heavy breathing and nothing else.

Margaret's resourcefulness is beginning to draw Geordie's attention. Photo: ITV for MASTERPIECE At the police station, the resourceful Margaret has uncovered the identity of the nurse in the photo. Her name is Ivy Franklin, and Sidney presided over her funeral after she died in bed three months ago. Curious as to whether her relationship with Dr. Atwell went beyond their shared workplace at the mental facility, Sidney and Geordie visit Ivy’s home, which she shared with her brother and niece Hilary. Hilary is guarded and solemn – her father is dying in a bed upstairs – but she does reveal that a dead crow was found in Ivy’s room: she thought it had flown in and gotten trapped.

If the connection weren’t clear enough, a man again calls Sidney and warns him that he will be the next victim. Already in a state of constant anxiety, his nerves flare when he and Geordie return to the vicarage and find the door wide open. Mrs. Maguire stands stricken in a corner while a bearish man cradles Amanda’s baby Grace. Geordie snatches away Grace and Sidney nearly strangles the man. Geordie and Mrs. Maguire rein Sidney in, and they sit the man down for questioning, having recognized him as one of the homeless people waiting for soup from Dr. Atwell on the morning of his death.

Sidney receives ominous warnings that he will be the murderer's next victim. Photo: Colin Hutton and Kudos/ITV for MASTERPIECE The man confesses that he witnessed the murder of the doctor. He was sleeping in the church when he saw a shadowy figure drown Atwell in a baptismal font, repeating “my Bonny lass” over and over as he did so.

Now questioning whether Ivy Franklin’s death was natural, the detectives exhume her body and find a creepy baby doll in the coffin. While the exhumation occurs, Leonard sits with Ivy’s niece Hilary as she nurses her father in order to keep her mind off the unsavory affair. When Leonard wakes from a nap, he spies Hilary burning a letter. Returning the next day on the pretense of comforting Hilary as her father wastes away, he rummages through her trash for the burnt fragments, but is caught.

Hilary relents in her secrecy and reveals that she took the letter from a collection plate at her aunt’s funeral. It was addressed to Sidney and revealed Ivy’s abuse of patients at the mental facility. Hilary herself had suffered cruelty at the hands of her aunt, but wanted to prevent a posthumous tarnishing of her aunt’s reputation. Sidney realizes that he is being targeted because whoever wrote the letter is enraged that he has done nothing to investigate the facility.

Having already visited the poorly maintained facility and encountered stonewalling by the director, Sidney and Geordie return to break in under cover of night. Sidney finds some names, including “Bonny,” etched on the wall behind a row of sinks in what is supposedly the tuberculosis ward, and Sidney pilfers a list of eight digit codes from a file labeled “TB.” Margaret again proves her mettle and deciphers the numbers: they reveal birth dates and initials. Whoever Bonny is, her last name starts with an “H.”

While Amanda and Sidney grow closer, Geordie and his wife Cathy grow apart. These increasingly frequent interactions between Margaret and Geordie, spiced with flirtation, are indicative of marital discontent. That conjugal strife is so obvious that even Geordie’s daughter picks up on it and runs away to the vicarage, where Geordie nearly clocks her when he hears a noise outside the window. His edginess is well-founded, however. Another phone call threatens Amanda’s baby Grace, and he rushes to where she is staying. Grace is safe, but Sidney is assaulted from behind and nearly drowned in the bathtub before Amanda saves him and the attacker escapes. Sidney did catch a glimpse, though: it was Harland, the church caretaker who discovered Dr. Atwell’s body.

Geordie has also figured out who the killer is, having visited the church and seen a bunch of crows in Harland’s quarters. The two detectives rush to the mental facility and stop Harland from murdering the director. The motive is explained: Bonny was Harland’s daughter and a patient at the facility. She was accidentally killed when a cruel punishment – thrusting her head underwater – went too far. Hence, Harland’s preferred killing method.

That case is closed, but developments in our characters’ lives complicate things. Geordie acts on his discontent and kisses Margaret – but Phil, yearning for a promotion, sees through the frosted glass and gains blackmail fodder. Leonard, subtly warned about his homosexuality by the new archdeacon, attempts to start a relationship with the bereaved Hilary, whose father has just died. And Sidney becomes even more conflicted when he and Amanda bring Grace to see her biological father, Guy, and Guy begins to sob.

Prime Suspect: Tennison airs Sundays at 9:00 pm. Previous episodes can be streamed here.

Jane Tennison as portrayed by Helen Mirren is a famously indomitable Detective Chief Inspector, plowing her way through institutional sexism and leaving flabbergasted men in her wake. But how did she reach the heights of the police force? By starting off as a rumpled, underestimated, low-ranking officer.

It’s 1973, and the ardor of the young Tennison (now played by Stefanie Martini) is immediately evident: witnessing the mugging of an old woman from the bus, she leaps off to run to the woman’s aid. Rain-soaked and disarrayed, Tennison receives a scolding when she arrives late to work afterwards. Further indignity is piled on as she is asked to serve senior officers tea and biscuits, while male colleagues leave her dishes to wash.

Tennison does soon receive more respectable work, when she is sent out to canvass residents of an apartment block where a seventeen year-old girl was found dead, strangled by her own bra. Tennison and her lone female colleague Morgan discover that Julie Ann, the girl, used to look for work as a prostitute outside a nearby pub. Questioning two other women there, they learn that Julie Ann had a dissolute addict boyfriend named Eddie.

Tennison's male colleagues expect little from her - except for her to clean up after them. Photo: ITV Studios and NoHo Film & Television While Tennison’s colleagues search Julie Ann’s apartment, three men approach to enter. Two of them are apprehended while the third escapes. One happens to be Eddie, who is so high he’s incoherent. When he sobers up, the officers squeeze an admission out of him that he last saw Julie Ann getting into a red Jaguar after leaving rehab – she was trying to get clean. Eddie then vomits on an officer’s shoes. He’s sent to the hospital while Tennison and Morgan are ordered to mop up.

Tennison is saved from that gross task by Detective Inspector Bradfield, who needs her at Julie Ann’s post-mortem. Tennison has already accompanied Bradfield to the next-of-kin visit to Julie Ann’s parents. Although Bradfield is kind to Tennison, he’s an exception: the coroner directs his conversation at the Detective Inspector, even when Tennison asks a question. The post-mortem reveals bruises from a couple weeks before Julie Ann’s death, and that she was six to eight weeks pregnant.

Bradfield returns to the station to find Eddie’s grandmother berating a clerk. The irate woman offers an alibi for Eddie – he was sleeping at her house at the time of the murder – and blames Julie Ann for getting Eddie beaten up after she borrowed money from someone. None of this conforms to Eddie’s account, and further suspicion is cast on him when Tennison returns to the prostitutes, one of whom lets out that Eddie had Julie Ann “trapped” and that she wanted out.

Tennison finds Bradfield at a local pub to share her information, but Eddie has already disappeared from the hospital. The two colleagues bond, drink too much, kiss, and awkwardly part ways after nearly being seen by another officer. As they nervously avoid eye contact at work the next day, Morgan finds out that a doctor at Julie Ann’s rehab hospital owns a red Jaguar. The car ends up being a dead end, but the doctor points them to an all-knowing receptionist at the rehab for more information on Julie Ann.

DI Bradfield is the only man to recognize Tennison's abilities, but the pair's relationship soon gets complicated. Photo: ITV Studios and NoHo Film & Television Like the prostitute, the receptionist suspects Eddie, and she also gives the officers a number that Julie Ann called the day before she left rehab. Eddie is still missing, however, so the officers pay another visit to the friend he was caught with near Julie Ann’s apartment. That man suggests that Eddie might have gone to one Dwayne Clark for refuge. Clark is already under surveillance by the police’s drugs unit, so he’s easy to find. When he is apprehended in a garage, his car is found to contain weed, cash, and a tally book of drug payments, but he denies it all. In spite of the stonewalling, the drugs unit does find a lead on another associate of Clark’s, a man named Oz.

Meanwhile, Bradfield and Tennison attend Julie Ann’s wake at her parents’ house. When Tennison is asked to call a cab for a guest, she recognizes the phone number of the house as the same that Julie Ann called from rehab. She peeks in the garage and sees a red Jaguar. Although Bradfield chastises her for searching for the car without proper procedure, he calls in a warrant and the whole team scours the house. In an upstairs bedroom, they discover traces of blood, red carpeting that matches fibers found on Julie Ann’s socks, and scratches on the door – Julie Ann must have been kept locked in the room. Julie Ann’s father is arrested.

And with those loose ends, we are left to wait for the next installment. Other things awaiting resolution: Tennison’s strained relationship with her overbearing mother and soon-to-be-married sister; and the bank robbery being plotted from jail by two men who don’t trust each other. Clifford Bentley got architectural plans to the bank from his rival prisoner Whiteley, and Bentley’s sons David and John are carrying out the heist with their cousin’s help. (Not coincidentally, I’m sure, Clifford’s wife is the woman Tennison saw getting mugged – as a warning to Bentley from Whiteley.) Something is bound to run awry, however, as David was connected to Julie Ann: he was the third man who tried to visit her apartment with Eddie. Oh, and Eddie is dead, but none of the police know it yet. Good luck waiting out the week to learn what happens next. Clifford Bentley is plotting a heist from prison. How is it connected to the murder of Julie Ann? Photo: ITV Studios and NoHo Film & Television

June 26 is Chocolate Pudding Day! While you may love the custardy American version, spice things up by trying the English kind, which is a cake. In Season 1 of The Great British Baking Show, the contestants were asked to make a self-saucing pudding. Kate came up with these Chocolate and Salted Caramel Molten Puddings, which are coated with almonds and release a gooey sauce when you cut into them. 

Ingredients

You will need four individual pudding molds (6fl oz), a hand-held mixer, a small pallete knife, and a cook's thermometer.

To prepare the pudding molds:

Photo: Courtesy PBS 1 oz sliced almonds
cake release spray
1 tbsp cocoa powder, for dusting

For the salted caramel:

1 tbsp golden syrup
2¼ oz caster sugar
3 oz double cream
¼ tsp rock salt

For the puddings:

2 oz butter, unsalted
3½ oz dark chocolate (minimum 70% cocoa solids), broken into pieces
1 oz plain flour, sieved
3 large free-range eggs
1 oz caster sugar
1¼ oz dark muscovado sugar
pinch salt

For the vanilla cream:

3½ fl oz double cream
1¾ oz icing sugar
1 vanilla pod, split in half lengthways and seeds scraped out

Directions

1. Lightly toast the sliced almonds in a dry frying pan over a low heat. When pale golden-brown set them aside to cool.

2. Spray the pudding molds with cake release spray and then divide the sliced almonds between the molds. Using a small sieve, generously dust the inside of the molds with cocoa powder. Place in the freezer.

3. For the salted caramel, place the golden syrup, caster sugar and four tablespoons of water in a small pan. Heat gently until the sugar dissolves.

4. Using a sugar thermometer, check the temperature of the caramel. When it reaches 320F, remove from the heat and stir in the cream and salt. Carefully pour the caramel into an ice cube tray. Allow to cool and then place in the freezer for about 30 minutes.

5. For the puddings, melt the butter in a large saucepan over a low heat. Remove from the heat and add the chocolate. Set aside to let the chocolate melt in the hot butter, stirring occasionally. Once cool (but still liquid) add the sieved flour and stir until incorporated and smooth.

6. Break the eggs into a large heatproof bowl. Place the bowl over a pan of gently simmering water (do not allow the water to touch the bowl). Whisking the eggs all the time, gradually add the sugars until the mixture is pale, light and fluffy (about seven minutes using a hand-held mixer). Remove the mixture from the heat and fold in the chocolate mixture and a pinch of salt.

7. Take the molds from the freezer and fill evenly with the mixture. Place the molds in the fridge and chill for at least 30 minutes.

8. For the vanilla cream, whisk the cream until it begins to thicken, then fold in the sugar and vanilla seeds. Spoon into a piping bag and put in the fridge.

9. For the puddings, preheat the oven to 350F. Select a baking tray large enough to fit the pudding molds.

10. Working quickly, remove the molds from the fridge and place on the baking tray. Remove the salted caramel from the freezer and scoop out the contents with a teaspoon and push into the pudding mixture, ensuring the caramels are encased in the pudding mixture.

11. Bake for 12 minutes, or until the sides look cooked but the middle is still a little wobbly. Remove from the oven and let the puddings sit in their molds for three minutes.

12. Slide a small palette knife around the inside edges of the molds and carefully turn them out onto serving plates. Pipe some vanilla cream next to each pudding and serve.

The fourth season of The Great British Baking Show on PBS is in full swing: you can watch the contestants battle it out over battter in the next episode on Friday, June 30 at 9:00 pm. (Previous episodes from this season are available to stream for free here.) Between Mary, Paul, Mel, Sue, and the intense pressure on the bakers, there are a lot of great expressions, perfect for memes. Find some of the best here.

When Mel or Sue make a suggestive joke:

When you feel a terror as chilling as Paul's blue eyes:

When you first read the recipe for the technical challenge:

When you win a challenge but then realize that the person who lost is right next to you:

When you eat too much delicious cake:

When you win Mary's approval:

When Paul doubts a recipe that you love:

When you have no idea what you're doing during the Technical challenge:

When you disappoint Mary and your heart deflates like a bad soufflé

How you feel every time you watch The Great British Baking Show: