documentary
Nick Hasted
The decontamination squad scraped the remains of 38-year-old ex-City professional Joyce Vincent from her seat, in front of a TV which had flickered unseen for three years. They took her wrapped Christmas presents too, and left unsolvable mysteries. How did she die? And how does someone become so alone that they’re left in a north-London flat above a busy shopping centre till their body melts into it?When director Carol Morley read a Sun headline announcing the macabre discovery in 2006, she pined for those answers, putting ads in the London press, the internet and even a black cab, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Will the app clicker replace the page turner?” asked Alan Yentob’s state-of-play rumination on the book. It’s a cutely phrased question and, as everyone reading this will be familiar with the digital world – this is theartsdesk, after all – a fair one. Will zeroes and ones make the book redundant, a sort of totem, or will it adapt, taking on the new forms presented by the digital world? The programme didn’t answer the questions, but at least it did show the possibilities.A hunt around the BBC’s various websites revealed that Books – the Last Chapter? was known as Books –the End of the Affair Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This was the television equivalent of the slaves in ancient Rome, who used to run alongside their imperial masters whispering in their ear, "Remember, you are mortal." Long before the tantrums, bombast and megalomania of The X Factor, there was New Faces, ITV's Birmingham-based talent show. Its theme tune was Carl Wayne's "You're a Star!" Alf Lawrie's film revisited the 1986 finalists of New Faces to find out how the last 25 years had treated them, and it proved to be an unassuming gem of observational film-making.None of the finalists went on to become the next David Bowie, some Read more ...
graham.rickson
Recorded music has a lot to answer for. Until its arrival, most people made their own music – at home, using whatever resources were to hand. If you were lucky, you might have owned a piano. The less well-off might have had access to a ukulele. Tony Coleman and Margaret Meagher’s enchanting, lo-fi documentary stakes a bold claim for the ukulele’s pivotal role in 20th-century music history.A variant of a folk instrument introduced by Portuguese immigrants to Hawaii in the 1870s, it was championed by King David Kalakaua, who was beguiled by the ukulele’s sweet sound. The annexation of Hawaii Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
That Alan Yentob gets around. I’ve run into him backstage during Jay Z's set at Glastonbury and in a jazz club in Poland, and here we found him in Rajasthan fronting a fascinating and well-shot programme, albeit workmanlike rather than really inspired, mostly set in one of the richest traditional music areas of India.Yentob (nicknamed Botney, which sounds like a furry robot) isn’t everyone’s cup of Bragg, and he isn’t that immediately likeable. Personally I prefer his lugubriousness to the overexcited and eager-to-please presenters TV bosses tend to go for. And he found the time to make a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Before the internet and the Kindle were invented, generations of Americans saw their lives refracted through the pages of Life magazine. In particular, through its photography, since writers at Life were largely relegated to supplying glorified picture captions. They were also allowed to carry the photographers' equipment.Obviously the idea of being an object of reverence appeals to photographers. Portrait and fashion snapper Rankin has long admired the work of the great Life lenspersons, and in this film he reviewed their accomplishments and tracked down some of the magazine's fabled Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s not long until we’re told, “There is enough money in the world to make everyone in the world a millionaire.” And if everyone was? Utopia and freedom might not be inevitable. Inexorable price rises would restore some sort of balance. Or a crash might follow. But as this extraordinary look into what’s been inspired by the American money motivators who’ve washed up on our shores showed: logic, be damned.The king and queen of money motivators are Robert T and Kim Kiyosaki. They met in a TGI Friday’s when he got an eyeful of her now-bejeaned legs. After they hooked up, he went on to write Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The archaeological documentary is becoming the obligatory format for tackling legendary tales of the British at war. Someone seems to recreate the Dam Busters raid every six months, the wrecks of battleships HMS Hood and the Bismarck have been tracked down in the ocean depths, and Time Team have excavated various subterranean artefacts from the Western Front.In Digging the Great Escape, we followed a team of historians, archaeologists and mining engineers to the site of the German Stalag Luft III prison camp in Silesia (now Poland), where 10,000 allied airmen were held captive during World Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The life-swap doc comes in sundry guises. Emissaries of simpler cultures visit our broiling cities to gawp at streets swimming in fresh spew and rivers of piss every Saturday night. Alternatively our lot pop off to places where people shit in holes and praise the Lord. Whichever way the story gets sliced, it’s always about the same thing: holding up a mirror to ourselves and not tending to like the view. Here’s what we look like when we stand next to this or that person with whom we wouldn’t change places for anything.Last year a programme called Amish: The World’s Squarest Teenagers brought Read more ...
howard.male
It’s a song which hangs in the air like pollen or reefer smoke, before gradually rising like a never-to-be-answered prayer. It began life as a lullaby but grew up to be a protest song, a scream of existential angst and even a purred invitation to sex. It’s a song like no other song, in that it has been covered more than any other song (its nearest competitors being “My Way” and “Yesterday”), and it was written by three Jewish immigrants before eventually being adopted by African-Americans as their own. A friend of Gershwin’s said, when reminiscing about hearing it for the first time Read more ...
ellin.stein
The advent of AIDS tore through San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of the city’s gay community, with the same ferocity as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Obviously there were differences - buildings and infrastructure remained intact and this was a slow-motion disaster that unfolded over years as opposed to days - but a devastated community reeling from loss was similarly left abandoned by indifferent authorities and so forced to fall back on its own resources to cope and rebuild. The other difference, of course, was that everyone knew what a hurricane entailed Read more ...
ash.smyth
How much do you remember about the Ghanaian presidential run-off of 2008? Me neither. And there's a reason for that. The Swiss documentary-maker Jarreth Merz spent three hectic months on the campaign trail, the better that we might understand – and he's put it all down in An African Election.In little over 50 years since Kwame Nkrumah's groundbreaking election as Africa's first black prime minister, Ghana has been through five military dictatorships and four republics. The most notable figure in all this chequered history is Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, who seized power in Read more ...