As it produces a large amount of juices, people recommend raising the chicken off the base of the slow cooker. They suggest various implements for this, but as I was going to use the juices for gravy, I instead chucked in a couple of sacrificial carrots - I'm out of celery, otherwise a couple of stalks of that would have gone in too. And, as usual, I stuck an onion in the fowl's body cavity.
The bird doesn't brown much, so after about five-and-a-half hours in the slow cooker on high, I transferred it to the roasting tin in which the potatoes were already cooking, at gas mark 7 for about fifteen or twenty minutes, which browned the skin nicely. (It could have handled a bit longer, in fact, to get it super crispy, but I was guessing at timings.) The tricky bit here was the transfer to the roasting tin, because it was so beautifully cooked that it was on the verge of falling to pieces when I lifted it (using two slotted spoons) - in fact, one of the wings dropped off, as did half of the other one.
In the meantime, the gravy I made with all the juices started out a very light colour, but being boiled and reduced for about fifteen minutes, it developed a really rich deep brown colour, indistinguishable from that of chicken Oxo, but with a much subtler flavour. All I added, apart from a little cornflour in water to thicken it, was a bit of pepper, and it was an absolutely excellent gravy.
So I'll definitely be doing that one again, though I have to remember to buy a small enough chicken to fit into my not-huge slow cooker
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