The state of British TV documentary film-making is a little depressing at the moment. Open up the documentaries tab on iPlayer, Now, ITVX or Channel 4, and you’ll be assaulted by a rush of true crime docs, each with their own macabre/salacious title – Satan’s Au Pair, Catching the Frying Pan Killer, that sort of thing – and a little rectangular title card with said killer looking evil, preferably in a grainy black and white picture with a bloody thumbprint overlaid.
And it if isn’t true crime you’re greeted with, it will be one of the other broadcaster-permitted forms of documentary these days: celebrity travelogues; largely unenlightening pop science docs about just how bad a certain type of food is for you; shameless corporate tie-ins where someone walks round a Haribo factory and gawps in wonder; tightly controlled famous-people profiles, where anything vaguely controversial or interesting has been sliced out of the final, interviewee-approved cut; or series about air fryers (Channel 5, we salute your unwavering commitment to this sub-genre).
OK I’m being a bit harsh here. There are still plenty of great, agenda-setting TV documentaries being made. But it does feel like an extremely hard time to be one of those TV documentary-makers, who have to work within the strictures of streaming, where series need to slot neatly into algorithmically selected genre verticals. You’d imagine many of those doc-makers must have read tributes and obituaries to Alan Yentob, when he passed away back in May, and felt a pang of jealousy over the freedom of his Arena heyday, where there was the potential to go and make documentaries on the Ford Cortina, the Chelsea Hotel or anything else, big or small, that fascinated you.
Lately I’ve been swerving a lot of current docs to instead watch older ones unaffected by algorithms and taste clusters. I’ve been really enjoying the films of Molly Dineen (pictured above), who seems a little overlooked in 2025 but who in the late 80s and 90s was regarded as a bit of documentary wunderkind, delivering a series of humane, idiosyncratic films about British life. Her breakthrough was in 1987 with Home From the Hill, a portrait of an old Empire colonel returning to Britain and having to navigate a changed world (and, in one absurd scene, a tin of ravioli). Resembling a real-life Rowley Birkin QC sketch from The Fast Show, but sadder and stranger, it was picked up by the BBC despite being made while Dineen was still in film school.
From there she rattled through a run of fascinating films on London Zoo, Irish roadwork companies, The House of Lords, and an epic two-hour profile of Geri Halliwell as she went from Spice Girl to UN goodwill ambassador. You’ll have to stump up for these – they’re available to rent on the BFI Player – though one of Dineen’s films is available on streaming, and it’s a corker. Heart of the Angel (1989), available on iPlayer, followed the “fluffers”, maintenance workers and ticket inspectors at a then-dilapidated Angel tube station as they mused on the existence of heaven and hell and argued over the cost of a single to Oval.
And actually, when you dig past the true crime, the iPlayer is a pretty amazing archive for these sorts of freewheeling older docs: tucked away in its furthest corners you’ll, find for example, Signs of the Times, a collaboration between the Beeb and Martin Parr that looks at ideas of good and bad taste in the British home, from mouldering country piles to terrace houses, and is full of eccentric figures like the bloke who thought it looked more stylish to only fill in the stonework on half of the wall behind his mantelpiece. Or old episodes of the archaeology strand Chronicle, including a loopy instalment where the show, with help from Olympic 800m runner Ann Packer, attempts to fact check the erroneous idea that Pliny claimed the Romans marched a load of geese from Northern Gaul to Rome. Or classic Arena instalments on the aforementioned Chelsea Hotel and pop artist Peter Blake’s fascination with Kendo Nagasaki. Or, of course, the hefty archive of films by Adam Curtis, from his early series like Pandora’s Box and the Living Dead, right up to the shorts he did for Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe.
Channel 4, too, is stuffed full of great vintage TV docs: Nick Broomfield films on the far-right south African politician Eugène Terre’Blanche, Biggie and Tupac, a post-premiership Margaret Thatcher, and the media circus around serial killer Aileen ‘Monster’ Wuornos; or Chasing Rainbows, one of the first proper TV surveys of British musical culture, from the music hall to Bhangra dance nights; or the three parter, White Tribe, where the great racial justice campaigner and broadcaster Darcus Howe digs into the meaning of white English culture, complete with an encounter with Bernard Manning. There are constant reminders of C4’s boundary-pushing, wildly experimental past in series like The Trip, an eight-parter that set early Nasa footage to Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and Richie Hawtin, or The Ghosts of Oxford Street, a completely crackers Malcolm McLaren docu-music film ode to London’s retail mecca that featured Tom Jones as the founder of Selfridges and the Happy Mondays as hanged highwaymen, and was somehow broadcast on Christmas Day.
It’s a shame, then, that ITV is so comparatively crap at celebrating its own documentary history: The Cook Report, Whicker’s World, South Bank Show, Death on the Rock and all. You won’t find any of that on ITVX, though you will find The Preppy Murder and Gary Barlow’s Food and Wine Tour: Australia. Still, ITV does have every episode of maybe the greatest British documentary achievement of them all, the 7Up series following, in seven year intervals, a group of British children as they grow up into adults. Despite the death of the series’ longtime director Michael Apted in 2021, the series is returning next year for 70Up – proof that, for all my grumbling about endless true crime docs, a sliver of Britain’s freewheeling documentary past still lives on.
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