documentary
Kieron Tyler
Sixty-five-year-old Penny was exceptional. Unfortunately, just how exceptional was revealed after her death from a brain haemorrhage. In life, she was in the minority of people - 29 per cent - who have placed themselves on the Organ Donor Register. Transplant was a sobering, measured examination of what happened to her organs after death. All participants had waived their right to anonymity.Retrieval surgeons found that Penny's heart, liver and kidneys were fully functioning and in perfect condition. Evidence for heart disease is usually expected. Sixty-five is the age limit above which Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Because Humphrey Jennings was a director of documentaries, he is never spoken of in the same breath as the greatest British directors of the past - Chaplin, Hitchcock, Powell, Lean and Reed. Another reason is that his career was short, compressed into the 16 years before his death at 43 in 1950 from a cliff fall in Poros, Greece, where he was scouting locations for a film about postwar healthcare in Europe. Yet Jennings was a visionary whose best films were touched with oddness and poetry - he was a poet and a painter, a champion of Surrealism - and chronicled more movingly than any Read more ...
josh.spero
I hadn't thought this one through very well. As someone who was put off horror films by a window crashing onto a hand in one of the Amityville movies at least two decades ago, watching Time Shift: Dear Censor last night, which promised to show some of cinema's most notorious scenes, was probably unwise. Happily, standards of gore, violence and sex have dropped so fast in the past 20 years that what was censorable in 1991 is PG now.A compact history of the British Board of Film Censorship (it became the less finger-wagging Classification in 1984), made with extensive access to its letters Read more ...
howard.male
Dinosaurs. Even just seeing that word takes me back to a letter my seven-year-old self wrote to Blue Peter humbly begging them for “More dinosaws pleez”. Back then, a sighting of these lumbering beasts on TV or at the movies was a rare and thrilling thing. But ever since Jurassic Park (and the fact they can be conjured up with relative CGI ease) we’ve been overrun by the things. The BBC alone have recently given us a Horizon special, a guide to their mythology, and even a programme on how to assemble one yourself should you stumble upon its bones in your back garden.Out of all this new dino Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You could call it the BBC Four effect. It’s fact-based fictions set in the past, more often than not about the absurdities of sexual mores or other changing customs. In the latest theatrical example, Steve Thompson’s new play - which opened last night - we time travel back to December 1975, when the surreal BBC comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus was due to be broadcast all across the United States. But wait a minute, here’s the snag: about one in four of the jokes have been cut. Why?Pythons Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam go to the States to find out. At first they are told by the ABC Read more ...
howard.male
Why did I dislike this programme so much? At first I put it down to the stinker of a hangover I found myself watching it through. Perhaps it was the thought that my hangover would have been easier to bear under a yolk-yellow Dordogne sun than under a glowering grey London sky, and therefore the British couples featured here who’ve made just that move caused a twinge of jealousy. But they weren’t bad company given that - on the basis of the title - I’d expected Little England to focus on the ruddy-faced lager lout variety of the Englishman abroad. So it must have been more than just that.Well Read more ...
ash.smyth
Over the course of the past weekend, not to mention over the last 10 years, it has been said often enough that there are no words to express the horror of 11 September, 2001. This hasn’t stopped people from trying, of course – and sometimes with commendable results. But basically there just isn’t much effective vocabulary when it comes to describing grief and torment on a grand scale: hence, perhaps, America’s seeming lack of closure regarding the whole episode, and the often slightly surreal and distant nature of 9/11 documentaries.Shorn of all the noisy “bigger picture”, though – the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
After the first two parts of Mark Cousins’s magisterial The Story of Film: An Odyssey, I’m still in two minds as to whether it’s fair to call the presenter a generalist. He has already managed to piece together details from the cinema cultures of almost every film-making nation on earth with the authority of a specialist – and that’s before his narrative has formally progressed beyond the arrival of the talkies, let alone colour. His 15-part documentary, developed from his book of the same name, looks set to give a new focus to traditional history-of-cinema surveys – and it looks different, Read more ...
howard.male
Scientists, eh? You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them: they cure life-threatening diseases and they threaten life with ever more powerful weapons. And in the instance of this documentary, they state the bloody obvious and then go to elaborate lengths to prove that their statements of the bloody obvious are objectively correct. We all know from experience that the vast majority of people are intrinsically good rather than intrinsically evil just by the very fact that our increasingly godless society hasn’t descended into chaos, so how many times do we need to have this Read more ...
ash.smyth
It seems unlikely that the founding fathers of social media had in mind a revolution of any greater magnitude than turning your teenager’s bedroom walls inside out and making themselves rich in the process. Still, here we are, less than a decade later, reeling from a series of very literal revolutions which have, over the past nine months, upheaved a vast tract of the Arab world and recalibrated the definition of people power. Revolutions which, the BBC now claims, were catalysed and facilitated by Facebook. The remit of How Facebook Changed the World – fronted by the aesthetically Read more ...
fisun.guner
Six months after giving birth to a child conceived through anonymous sperm donation, Sylvia decided to become an egg donor. It was her way, she said, of “giving something back”. It was 1991 and she was to become one of Britain’s first anonymous egg donors. Once she'd left the clinic, she was expected to think no more about it: she was helping an infertile woman realise her dreams, just as she, lacking Mr Right, had been helped to realise hers. She never thought for a minute that her act of altruism would come back to haunt her.Six weeks after donating her eggs, Sylvia came across an article Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Does anyone else ever feel a mite sorry for the North Pole? It always takes second billing to its more famous namesake, and you can see why. The South Pole belongs to a continental land mass. Antarctica has penguins, historic huts, and chaps going outside, maybe for some time. The North Pole, stuck up there on basically a huge floating icicle, is hedged about with ifs and buts. Who got there first? No one knows. And when you stand precisely at 90.00.00 degrees north, the drift of the ice soon shifts you off it. If the Poles were siblings, the South would inherit the land and the title. The Read more ...