This is from Smooth Operations' website:-

THE 2006 RADIO BALLADS - THE PROCESS
Series executive producer John Leonard, tape editor Annie Grundy and interview gatherers Vince Hunt and Sara Parker (daughter of original producer Charles Parker) selected six issues dominating the half-century since the original Radio Ballads of Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger were begun in 1957. Hunt and Parker then set out to visit steelworks, shipyards and fairgrounds, cross the countryside with fox and hare hunters, talk to musicians who'd been caught up in the Troubles and to people living with HIV/AIDS, and to gather location atmosphere and sound effects, in the process speaking with hundreds of interviewees.
Once gathered, the interviews were edited into themes, with layers of recollections and memories. These were then sifted and arranged into possible groupings for songs to be written, under the guidance of musical director John Tams who assembled a team of professional musicians drawn mostly from the current folk music scene, as were the musicians in the original Ballads.
As this Ballad series was commissioned as part of the BBC's Voices project, they used dialect, slang and shared experience to inform their songs, and John Tams accompanied Parker and Hunt on several interview-gathering trips to fairgrounds and steelworks. Winter 2005 was a blur of activity around Tams' studio as musicians gathered from across the UK to work out parts and hone the songs, while John Leonard set up camp with a laptop in the kitchen to edit each new stage into the overall Ballad, sometimes asking for fresh interviews to match the songs, sometimes re-working the flow of the programme to take into account an excellent new song demanding more airtime.
Each Ballad is a mammoth work, taking many hours of songwriting, musicianship, interview-gathering, editing and production from start to finish. We hope you enjoy them.
The 2006 Radio Ballads is a series of powerful insights into issues of our time, made using the principles of the original Radio Ballads of the 1950s and 1960s. In-depth radio programmes that feature people describing their working lives and experiences both joyful and painful, they offer an illuminating insight into the human condition.
BROADCAST DATES
The Song of Steel - Monday 27 February 9pm
The Enemy That Lives Within - Monday 6 March 9pm
The Horn of the Hunter - Monday 13 March 9pm
Swings and Roundabouts - Monday 20 March 9pm
Thirty Years of Conflict - Monday 27 March 9pm
The Ballad of the Big Ships - Monday 3 April 9pm

Song of Steel
Decline of Sheffield & Rotherham's steel industries.
Enemy That Lives Within
Modern stories of people living with HIV/AIDS.
Horn of the Hunter
Both sides of the story of hunting with hounds.
Swings and Roundabouts
The travelling people who run Britain's fairgrounds.
Thirty Years of Conflict
Sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland.
Ballad of the Big Ships
The shipyards of Tyne & Wear and the Clyde.