fri 11/07/2025

documentary

The Truth About Your Teeth, BBC One

Teeth. Who’d have them? This documentary about the state of the nation’s gnashers came along at a timely moment for your reviewer. Earlier in the week I suffered my first ever extraction. Didn’t feel a jot of pain, of course, but by Christ you know...

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When Pop Ruled My Life, BBC Four

A long time ago I went out into the field to research a feature about the three ages of obsessive fandom. At the entry level was a bog-standard legion of young teenage girls who simply hung around outside the mansion block in Maida Vale where one or...

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The Secret Life of Tinder, Channel 4

Lucky old us. We are now living “in a techno-sexual era”. So claimed this documentary about dating apps which radar-guide you to the nearest available groin. If groins are your thing, that is, and they are by no means everyone’s. We heard about a...

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DVD: National Gallery

A heretical thought. Films released on the big screen are designed to be devoured in one swallow. But if ever a three-hour epic was made for consumption in bite-sized chunks, it is National Gallery, Frederick Wiseman’s discreet profile of the much-...

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Lambert & Stamp

“I fell in love with both of them immediately,” says Pete Townshend of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers who took his band The Who to world-wide success. An hour into Lambert & Stamp, a documentary on the duo, the depth of that bond is...

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Britain's Greatest Generation, BBC Two

You can’t move for the World Wars on the BBC. Gallipoli (100 years ago) and VE Day (70) are this month’s on-trend anniversaries, and they’ll soon budge up for VJ Day and the Somme. And let’s not forget older victories: there’s Waterloo (200 years...

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Shark, BBC One

It is perhaps a clever piece of ironic perversity to have scheduled the first part of a three-part documentary on sharks on polling day, but the subject here is the comings and goings inside the complex world of the predators of the sea. The series...

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DVD: Turned Towards the Sun

The phrase “improbable life” crops up more than once in Greg Olliver’s highly engaging documentary Turned Towards the Sun about the poet Micky Burn (its title is that of the writer’s autobiography). It’s a contradiction in terms, perhaps, but as a...

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I Wish to Die Singing, Finborough Theatre

Agitprop is a term that seems to have dropped out of use. It has too many negative connotations; it smacks of political rant. Yet artistic director Neil McPherson, whose small and feisty Finborough Theatre at Earls Court receives no public funding...

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24 Hours in the Past, BBC One

The past is a foreign country. Celebrities do things differently there. Programmes which put people in time machines and whizz them back to a less centrally heated era have been around for a while. Back in the day they’d pick on ordinary people and...

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The Decent One

Remember the Hitler diaries? Stern and the Sunday Times were so eager for them to be true they went ahead and published even after historian Hugh Trevor Roper had changed his mind about their authenticity. Such was the hunger for stories about Nazis...

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Dennis Marks, 1948-2015

Dennis Marks, who has passed away at the young age of 66, was in every way larger than life. A talented and prolific music and arts documentary filmmaker, an inspired head of music for BBC Television, and artistic director of the ENO, he latterly...

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