Towards the conclusion of the eleventh series' broadcast, applications for the twelfth series were made available in December 2015, with production staff assessing applicants between January and February 2016. Work on filming the series took place from late Spring to early Summer, once assessments had determined which eighteen applicants would form the final line-up. Both the filming and broadcast schedule for this series had to take into account three major events receiving live TV coverage during 2016 – the UK government had announced in 2015 that they would be holding a major referendum pertaining to the future of the country's EU membership, which the major broadcasters would be covering, while the BBC's Summer schedule had been prepared to oversee live coverage of both Euro 2016 and the 2016 Rio Olympics. As such it stuck to the same arrangement as had been used in the previous series, though unusually the episodes were arranged so that the majority took place on Thursdays within the standard timeslot it occupied; it is the only series to date to have this arrangement in its broadcast schedule.