documentary
Adam Sweeting
This terrifying but gripping BBC Four series about Northern Ireland’s savage sectarian war reached its conclusion with a meticulously detailed account of how hostilities were eventually brought to a close by the Good Friday Agreement, which came into effect in December 1999. In the end, it resulted from a combination of politics, compromise and a realisation that the interminable violence was an obstacle to change rather than a way to achieve itAmerican senator George Mitchell, who chaired the all-party peace negotiations, declared: “This agreement proves that democracy works. We can say to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sir Lenny Henry, PhD and CBE, is scarcely recognisable as the teenager who made his TV debut on New Faces in 1975. He’s been a stand-up comedian, musician and Shakespearean actor, and even wrote his own dramatised autobiography for BBC One.A determined buster of boundaries, he has also campaigned tirelessly for more ethnic diversity on British TV. For this new three-part series, aided by film clips and a few talking heads, he uses the history of TV comedy to map changing attitudes to race and immigration. Programmes two and three will tackle stand-up and sketch comedy, while this opening Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apparently your odds of dying in a plane crash are about one in 11 million, while chances of death in a car accident are about one in 5,000. Therefore flying is theoretically safe, and supposedly getting safer. You wouldn’t know it from the TV schedules though, littered as they are with the likes of Air Crash Investigation, Seconds from Disaster and documentaries about Concorde’s hideous demise in Paris in 2000. YouTube hosts an apparently infinite number of air crash “greatest hits”.Chaos in the Cockpit is Channel 5’s contribution to the queasy cult of plane-wreck TV, and director Kim Lomax Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Monday night’s first episode of this three-part series was a bit ordinary, as it introduced its cast of British recreational cocaine users and explained why their habit may be ill-advised. We learned that the British take more drugs than any other nation in Europe, the cocaine you buy on the street has probably been cut with lactose and caffeine and, according to a professor of Addictive Behaviour Science, cocaine plunders the brain’s dopamine reserves and causes violent heart palpitations (cocaine and heart attacks often go together). Then the volunteers flew to Medellín in Colombia, home Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Berry Gordy, who founded the Motown label in Detroit in 1959, borrowed his star-maker machinery from the car assembly line. When he worked at the Lincoln-Mercury plant he was inspired by how a bare metal frame would emerge as brand new car. “What a great idea! Maybe I could do the same thing with my music. Create a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door, an unknown, go through a process, and come out another door, a star.”That process worked. Motown became the largest black-owned business in America. This joyful 60th anniversary documentary by British directors Ben and Gabe Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“It’s nice to make money – lots of money,” said Michel Cohen, former high-flying New York art dealer turned debtor, jailbird and fugitive. He made oodles of the stuff and then lost it all, leaving a string of wealthy art collectors and galleries to lick their wounds over the colossal debts he never repaid.Vanessa Engle’s film for the BBC's Arena strand was a portrait of the man and the big-money art scene of the 1990s, as well as a barely-believable detective story as the documentarist tracked down her quarry after he’d disappeared in Rio de Janeiro 16 years ago. Vengeful creditors and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
David Cameron has been a recluse since the fateful days of June 2016 when the referendum on EU membership didn’t go quite the way he’d hoped. He’s probably been living through a private purgatory. “I think I will think about this forever,” he murmured to the camera in this first instalment of BBC One’s two-part doc.Finally, though, his inevitable (though surely not “long-awaited”) autobiography is hitting the shops. Dave, who now looks like a slightly melancholy hedge fund manager or the kind of chap who skippers a 40-foot gin palace down the Solent on the weekend, has dragged himself out of Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s new documentary, Honeyland, is a lament for a vanishing world. Captured with the delicacy of honeycomb, it focuses on the last wild beekeeper in Europe. Hatidze Muratova lives in rural Macedonia on a craggy farm without running water or electricity. Her ailing, aged mother, Nazife, is her only company. They may bicker, but there’s a great deal of love, shown in the way Hatidze spoon-feeds her yoghurt and honeycomb, or washes her hair over a basin. Despite the hardships of her lifestyle, Hatidze is content. She is the wild bee’s caretaker. As Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
September 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day, and Channel 5 marked the occasion with this sobering documentary. Focusing on male suicide – incredibly, now the UK’s biggest killer of men under 45 – it studied six patients at the Riverside Mental Health Centre in Hillingdon, west London. The results were both harrowing and heartbreaking.Director Rachel Harvie stood back and let her interviewees tell their stories, which served as both therapy and confessional. Charlie, a sad, mild-mannered boy of 18 covered in self-inflicted scars, has been diagnosed with ADHD, depression, social anxiety and “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“The Troubles” is a polite euphemism for the ferocious storm of sectarian violence and political chaos which convulsed Northern Ireland for 30 years, before being brought to a close by 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. Irish journalist Darragh MacIntyre fronts this seven-part history of those fearful days, and the first instalment of Spotlight on The Troubles: A Secret History (BBC Four) took us from the first stirrings of Catholic versus Protestant conflict in the mid-Sixties to the full-blown horrors of murders, bombings, mass internment and the British Army’s increasingly bloody involvement.It Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This was the first of a two-part investigation into... well, I don't know what. The voiceover of High Society: Cannabis Café said it was an experiment “to test the alleged benefits of weed” and the people featured all had “a personal motivation for getting stoned” as they visited an Amsterdam coffee shop, where dope is sold legally.The jaunty music and lack of scientific context suggested that it was essentially a voyeuristic exercise where we watched normally uptight Brits getting giggly, having the munchies and (a few) telling someone they loved them.There were occasional funny moments Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It may sound perverse to say it, but Albert was the perfect twenty-first century prince. Thrust into the heart of the British monarchy he was simultaneously an oppressed outsider who – despite his reputation as the most handsome prince in Europe (not least when wearing white cashmere pantaloons) – struggled to make his voice and intelligence heard. This curiously female aspect of his plight certainly adds a frisson to a story that would be remarkable by any standards. Thank goodness for historians that it is: for two hundred years after both he and Victoria were born we are being Read more ...