1. You know that strange TV politics show that goes out late on a Thursday night after Question Time? Well they let BuzzFeed have access behind the scenes.
This is Vicky Flind, the editor of the programme who is responsible for ensuring the programme makes it on to air.
2. Everything's pulled together at the last minute.
3. The crew really push the limits when coming up with daft ideas.
And they even got Michael Portillo to wear a onesie last Christmas.
4. Guests have a certain amount of control. Stewart Lee turns up and is shown the script. He has a few issues.
"They told me that I was coming on to talk about what you can and can't say in comedy about politics. But it seems to have grown into a wider thing about how Katy Perry accidentally used an islamic symbol in a music video," he explains afterwards.
"Also, I have written thousands of words on blasphemy and it's incredibly nuanced. Whenever I try and explain it on a programme like this it gets boiled down to a sentence - which if you've had five years of work wrecked by religious people and have friends who are religious you are very careful to maintain a nuanced position."
"The idea that you could discuss blasphemy and offence as an adjunct to something else... well for a start you'd have to talk about how the whole world is different post-7/7. Most of the time I just won't say anything about it."
5. Everything stops when Molly the dog, the real star of the show, turns up. We learn that she's just eaten a large amount of chicken.
Molly is one of three golden retrievers belonging to Andrew Neil, the show's host. And since she started appearing in this twisted late capitalist version of This Week she's become the star of the show, judging guests with a waft of her paw or falling asleep.
Assistant editor Richard has thought very deeply about the cultural impact of becoming the first current affairs show to have a dog as a regular guest: "At first we didn't make a big deal of her. But since then there's two or three other programmes that have got dogs. I really think people have started having random dogs on set."
Hello Molly.
6. Molly has her own bowl of water in the studio. Ensuring this is replenished a key role for the staff.
7. Other guests arrive. Alan Johnson, the former Labour home secretary, is a very friendly man. This is what happened when we asked him to write down what makes This Week a success.
8. And fellow guest Stewart Lee thinks these are the qualities that make the show work.
9. And this is what happens when you ask Andrew Neil to describe This Week:
10. Meanwhile, Michael Portillo tells us that he went to school with his regular co-guest Diane Abbott. But no one at the BBC knew when they booked them for the show.
11. The This Week studio is a broom cupboard, albeit quite a nice broom cupboard.
And these are the unsung heroes who ensure the footage actually makes it out of this box.
12. When the show begins guests sit in a grim corridor and are whisked in and out very quickly.
13. But if you nip to the toilets then you'll find an internal shelter area, which is guarded by BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson.
14. TV production galleries still look like a 1980s vision of the future.
15. There is something very silly about watching a man edit footage of a dog sitting up on a sofa and cuddling up to a very serious political pundit.
16. Pinned to the wall of the gallery is a brilliant, brilliant note to the production crew sent in by a viewer.
17. In fact, if you look carefully there's warnings that strange things are afoot around Millbank.
18. This Week's brilliantly self-loathing Twitter feed is run by this man.
This is what he has to deal with:
haven't watched @bbcthisweek in ages. It's still both awful and inexplicably compelling at the same time
Very happy that @bbcthisweek is back! It's terrible, as always, but that's why we love it!
Stop it, @bbcthisweek . Just stop. #bbctw
"We're the number one trending show on British TV, so keep up all your pathetic efforts on The twitter" says @afneil #bbctw
19. We also learned that dogs can quickly tire of current affairs programmes.
20. And the show ends with four men and a golden retriever looking totally baffled as this happens.
What you're watching is a visual joke about the state of the government's Universal Credit welfare payments system that relies on you a) knowing that Iain Duncan Smith's flagship project is rapidly turning into a classic Whitehall technology procurement clusterfuck of epic proportions, b) that video is a clip that briefly went viral in some odd corner of the internet and involves 35,000 people trying to play a single game of Pokemon at the same time, c) being able to put that together in your head after midnight on a Thursday while watching a surreal politics show.
I don't think Andrew, Michael, Alan or Stewart had a clue what was going on. This made it even better.
21. When the lights go up everyone makes polite conversation.
22. And after the show everyone has a drink of cheap wine in a polystyrene cup.
