documentary
Adam Sweeting
Apart from her acting abilities, the qualities which made Sheridan Smith a star were her authenticity and lack of pretension. Both shone brightly from ITV's affecting documentary, in which Smith assessed how her success affected her mental health and how she desperately wants the arrival of her new baby to open a fresh chapter in her life.Perhaps director Tanya Stephan took it for granted that the audience would already know about her longer-than-your-arm list of stage and screen credits (comedy, TV drama, stage musicals and even a bit of Ibsen and Shakespeare), because hardly any of it was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stories of the destruction of the natural environment are depressingly common, but Frank Gardner brought a fresh slant to this punchy account of a botanical expedition to Colombia (BBC Two). Best known as the BBC’s security correspondent, Gardner was partially paralysed in a terrorist attack in Riyadh in 2004, but was determined that this wouldn’t stop him. “I traded in my wheelchair for a pack horse,” he declared.It almost didn’t work, because a panicky Gardner, unable to cling on with his legs, was almost flung from his horse while descending a steep mountain track. The local Colombian Read more ...
Owen Richards
In 2018, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui burst onto the documentary scene with McQueen, a visually stunning study of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Acclaim and offers followed, but no-one could have predicted the subject of their second feature.Rising Phoenix is an expansive look at the Paralympics, its athletes, and the wider disability rights movement. Releasing on Netflix this week, the documentary covers the success of London 2012, the fiasco of Rio 2016, and the incredible stories behind the biggest names in para-sport. Owen Richards spoke with directors Bonhôte and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Manctopia” sounds like a blissed-out buzzword from the golden years of New Order and Happy Mondays, but in this four-part series (BBC Two) it’s used to describe the explosive redevelopment of Manchester. One of the fastest growing cities in Europe, it has been experiencing a sci-fi-like eruption of skyscrapers and upscale residential properties, and with London prices at astronomical levels, Manchester has been delighting property investors with its lucrative returns. Salford's burgeoning MediaCityUK, now the second home of the BBC, has been a further signifier of the city’s rising prestige. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
During World War Two, President Franklin D Roosevelt described the USA as “the arsenal of democracy”. Only a couple of decades later, Fidel Castro was busily turning Cuba, only 100 miles from the US mainland, into the factory of revolution, exporting armed struggle around the world. It made his country a geopolitical player out of all proportion to its size, at the cost of violently antagonising the Americans.Castro’s militant interventions in Algeria, the Congo, Angola and El Salvador were covered in the first part of this documentary (made by factual programming specialists Brook Lapping Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On one level this documentary could be summed up as “parents have baby”, but since the parents in question are “Britain’s most prominent transgender couple”, it was a lot more complicated than that. Jake Graf used to be a woman and his wife Hannah was previously a man, and the path to having their first child caused them considerable soul-searching.You might ask why they would want to have a Channel 4 film crew pursuing them during a stressful year in which they searched for a surrogate mother and tracked down a suitable sperm donor. Perhaps they considered it a way of demonstrating to a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was Alison Ellwood who directed 2013’s History of the Eagles, and now she’s at the helm of this new two-parter on Sky Documentaries, telling the story of the Los Angeles music scene from the mid-Sixties to the early Seventies. The musicians’ community in the streets and meandering side roads off Laurel Canyon Boulevard was a hive of artistic activity encompassing among others The Byrds, The Monkees and The Turtles, Love and The Doors, Crosby Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, the Mamas & the Papas, Jackson Browne and the Eagles. Frank Zappa lived here too, and even the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Sun bears and moon bears are probably doomed, so why bother? Wildlife trafficking is a hugely profitable worldwide criminal enterprise, with small charities (fingers in the dyke, anyone?) doing their best to stem the flow.The international charity Free the Bears operates in several south-east Asian countries, trying its best to save the sun bears and moon bears. In a pair of BBC Two programmes, over a year we followed the efforts of the conservationist Giles Clark to help his friend Matt Hunt (who runs Free the Bears) set up a bear sanctuary just outside Luang Prabang in Laos. Crucially Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This quirky little film about the Isle of Dogs (Channel 4), a vanishing fragment of the old London docklands overshadowed by the Canary Wharf skyscrapers while its traditional homes are usurped by new and unloveable tower blocks, presented a flavoursome line-up of rogues, jokers and eccentrics. Some families have lived there for 150 years, but now the community's future is under threat from property developers and big business.Local songwriter Hak Baker (pictured below), a rare Caribbean face in this white working-class world, helped the story along with his acoustic guitar ballads as he Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Farms have played quite a large part in the history of rock, not just in terms of those wealthy stars who retire to one, tending sheep and making cheese. The festivals at Woodstock, the Isle of Wight and Glastonbury all took place on farms but before everyone turned on, tuned in and dropped out in the mud and the sun, two farmers in a village on the Welsh borders had set up the world’s first residential recording studio.Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm, which premiered on BBC Four on Saturday evening, told the remarkable story of Britain’s own honky chateau, as Elton John named the album he Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As an opening line to BBC Two's new three-part series, “Rupert Murdoch is an enigma” failed to set pulses racing. It rather implied that after three hours of documentary TV, we may end up none the wiser about what makes the scary Australian media tycoon tick.Still, director Jamie Roberts and his team had done their due diligence in the research department, turning up a trove of nuggets from the archives interspersed with pithy interviews from assorted players in Murdoch’s extraordinary journey, including Alan Sugar, Hugh Grant, Piers Morgan and Andrew Neil. There were some chilling Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Documentaries like this one make me sentimental for a time, until about 25 years ago, when classical music was a more or less weekly presence on terrestrial TV. Now fast disappearing from view altogether, on mainstream media and in school curriculums, the genre faced the most uncertain of futures even before COVID-19 wiped it off the face of public life, for those of us still accustomed to darkening the doors of churches, concert halls and opera houses. We should, the argument might run, be grateful for whatever crumbs are thrown our way, even more delighted by any attempt to enlarge our Read more ...