Rehearsals for The Lord of the Rings on stage

The largest air show, the greatest museum tour, a theatrical magnum opus…. This is a show that promises not just a ringside view but a look at the lead-up as well. National Geographic Channel has launched its big-ticket series Inside in India (Wednesdays at 9pm). “We wanted to look for iconic events, things people wonder what went behind,” producer Vicky Mathews tells t2 from New York.

You can look forward to getting a peek behind the scenes of The Lord of the Rings, which recently premiered on Broadway. “The Rings trilogy is a work of pure fantasy. Taking it to the stage was a crazy idea,” Mathews says. The Inside team went into London’s Theatre Royal to figure out how technology, engineering and art was coming together for the production. “There was phenomenal use of intelligent lights, for instance, to create the effect of a volcano. Then there was the challenge of making men look like hobbits.... There was a fighting sequence where people had to be bouncing up and down. The talking trees actually were people on seven-foot stilts. One of the stars of the show, the queen of the elves, had to be suspended in air,” explains Mathews. “In such situations... till one gets to the end, one is not sure if they would work.” The episode beams here on June 18 at 9pm.

The June 25 episode, Inside Tut’s Treasure Tour, chronicles an extraordinary journey. For the first time in 30 years, the treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamen were going on tour. “The 3,000-year-old artefacts can get damaged even if you breathe on them.” So precautions reached paranoid proportions. “Every time an object was being removed, in the presence of an Egyptian curator, pictures were taken of it before and after to prove it was unharmed. We caught the journey from Chicago to Philadelphia, insured at a staggering $650 million.”

This Wednesday, fly to the Oshkosh air show in the US. “It is one of the largest and most prestigious air shows in the world. Thousands of people fly in, often in hand-crafted aircrafts.”

Sudeshna Banerjee