documentary
Tom Birchenough
The initial challenge – and there should be no underestimating the scale of it – of Nick Read’s documentary Russia's Toughest Prison - The Condemned must have been getting into a location which the great majority of its inmates will never leave. That was likely facilitated by the acquaintance between the film’s producer Mark Franchetti, the longterm Moscow correspondent of The Sunday Times, and Subkhan Dadashov, the laconic governor of Penal Colony 56: Franchetti had been the first foreigner to visit this remote prison in the Urals at the beginning of the last decade. Dadashov, who himself Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Cats have had a harder time adapting to humans than humans to cats, as this remarkable examination of contemporary feline habits points out. It is not always easy changing from wild animal to feline friend, as the programme put it. Nocturnal hunters now have a life in the daytime, but they are still solo rather than pack animals. While a dog will cling to his pack – his human family – the cat susses out the physical territory on its own, seeing how safe it is and where to hide if necessary.The hundred cats under observation in this three-part study – to come are hunters at night, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In a house in Nuneaton, a man calling himself Stinson Hunter lures paedophiles towards exposure, shame and possible prosecution. “We set the profile that is like the rope,” he explained. “And then if they choose to put that rope round their neck and hang theirselves [sic], that is their choice. We have not pushed them.”The bait is simple. Hunter loads a fake female profile on a casual dating site then awaits contact from men. His replies, in the voice of a fictional girl, make it repeatedly clear that she is underage. Undeterred, men turn up for what they assume is a rendezvous for illegal Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This excellent documentary considerably deepens the Nick Cave we know. If there is a Cave other than the spiritually and intellectually ravenous rock star with the raven hair, bone-dry wit and shamanic showman seen here, a bumbling secret identity behind the crafted persona, co-directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard don’t want to know. The junkie punk whose bands The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds once thrived on confrontation and chaos only has a walk-on part in this portrait of the artist who survived those white-knuckle, white-powder days.Visual artists Forsyth and Pollard’s first Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
At the end of this absorbing documentary about the art – and life – of Paul Nash we visited his tombstone in a Buckinghamshire churchyard, accompanying writer and presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon as he laid sunflowers on the grave. He reminded us that Nash saw the sunflower as a symbol for the soul, turning to the sun; indeed one of his last paintings was “Solstice of the Sunflower”.The final phrase Graham-Dixon used about this highly literate and intelligent artist was that he had been haunted by life, haunted by death, and by the ghosts of war. Unusually, Nash was an official war artist in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Changing perceptions” is the byline that Mitsubishi gives to its sponsorship of Channel 4’s documentary slot. Animal-lovers, a constituency that surely makes up a sizable part of evening viewers, will certainly have come away from Matt Rudge’s bizarrely entertaining film All Creatures Great and Stuffed with their perceptions changed.Against the background of more tradit animal shows like the BBC’s current Our Zoo, not to mention the innumerable lives, secret or otherwise, of cats and dogs that frolick their way periodically through the schedules, Rudge’s study of the astonishing growth of Read more ...
ellin.stein
Ever since his 1967 breakthrough film Titticut Follies, an unsparing look at a Massachusetts prison for the criminally insane, Frederick Wiseman has been turning his dispassionate observational camera on the workings of institutions ranging from the US Marines to high school, juvenile court, and the American Ballet Theater. His latest, At Berkeley, is an in-depth exploration of the University of California’s San Francisco Bay Area outpost (UC is made up of several self-contained component universities distributed across the state, with Berkeley the jewel in the crown).Expecting anyone who isn Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Bennet family had an issue. Time to get the Austenesque quips out of the way. For the Bennets in Gems TV the truth universally acknowledged was, roughly: “That a £100 million family-run jewellery television channel risking running out of its best-selling African gem, not to mention suffering from a shortage of screen presenters who can flog the stuff, must be in want of a friendly television documentary format to get them out of their fix.” (For the record, no one seemed sure if it was a single “t” or a double one in Bennet: ITV gave them one – closet Janeites there, eh? – the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Britain, as Tamsin Greig’s soothing voiceover told us at the top of this hour, is a nation in love with its animals. Still, it’s unlikely that BBC Two is betting the house on this docu-soap, which will follow the lives of 10 students through their final year at the Royal Veterinary College and which is screening every night for the rest of this week. The cynic in me expects that the channel had a few too many episodes and not enough weeks before the next series of The Apprentice was due to begin.Which is a bit of a shame because, although Young Vets is hardly reinventing the genre - unless Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The role of women during the First World War has been heavily mythologised in a way that has cast them as both the angels of the home front and a force for positive political change. What made this documentary, written and presented by revered war correspondent Kate Adie, so fascinating was that as well as providing a comprehensive guide to the many roles played by women during the conflict, it blew some of those myths wide open.For example, although the lives of most women in 1914 were defined “more by what you couldn’t do than what you could”, the history books tend to leave out the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As we approach the anniversary of the beginning of World War I, the television schedules devoted to it are becoming denser and denser. In volume, at least, rather more than insight. We wonder just what more can be broadcast, after all, about the history concerned that has not already been said at some point in the century that has followed the conflict's tragic onset?Jan Peter’s ambitious Great War Diaries answers two questions that remain relevant, namely, just how did it really feel, and then, what was it like for those on the other side(s)? One of the more impressive programmes we have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The RAF's renowned aerobatics team found itself at the centre of a political mini-storm last week when it was asked to use only blue and white smoke trails (but not red) at the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in Glasgow. The MoD briskly quashed the request, prompting dark rumours about an anti-separationist conspiracy in Whitehall. However, I can't imagine the pilots themselves even noticed, so ferociously do they have to concentrate on their day jobs.This documentary followed the Arrows during the six months of training leading up to this year's air display season, which happens to be Read more ...