Sport is just fodder for documentaries now
High-stakes “sportertainment” puts casual streamers and shareholders above fans and tradition.
ByDocumentary
A baffling but brilliant ride through Birmingham’s surrealist scene
Stewart Lee’s Radio 4 documentary on the city’s artistic past is jarring, hard to follow and utterly engaging.
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Why the “golden age of the documentary” is a myth
More are being released than ever before – but the documentary has entered its corporate era.
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You won’t ever forget Channel 4’s Afghanistan documentary Evacuation
Give this revelatory series your time. Let it rip open your heart.
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A history of the world in circles
Radio 4’s In the Loop explores the secrets of things that are round – from particle accelerators to the 5,000-year-old…
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How the tabloid media turned on Anna Nicole Smith
Smith’s life, death and now – thanks to a new Netflix documentary – after-life was a spectacle.
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How Judy Blume became a lightning rod in the culture wars
The frank explorations of puberty and sexuality that made her books radical in the 1970s are newly controversial in the…
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GB News’s pipeline to Downing Street
Rishi Sunak’s plan to tackle “grooming gangs” closely follows a documentary on the topic.
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The rise of reality star documentaries
Former cast members from Love Island or Made in Chelsea have a new route to relevance – presenting “serious” factual…
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Netflix doesn’t understand why people watch porn
The documentary Moneyshot grapples with the adult industry’s biggest problems – but not those who consume its content.
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How the tabloids outed George Michael
A new Channel 4 doc explores the media’s glee at the singer’s arrest for “lewd acts” in 1998. But in…
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The exploitative history of Hollywood sex scenes
A new documentary explores the making of intimate nude scenes of the past – and future.
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The cheap trend of sensationalist docudramas
Colleen Rooney? Boris Johnson? Prince Andrew? All have gone through the pop culture scandal to prestige TV pipeline.
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The last bell foundry in Britain
This peek inside the John Taylor bell foundry is a ringing endorsement for BBC radio storytelling.
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The hypocrisy of Zara McDermott’s disordered eating documentary
The BBC can’t pretend a show hosted by a fitness influencer who posted restrictive meal plans on Instagram is a…
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The male, pale Haçienda myth
A new BBC documentary cements the dull cult of nostalgia around Manchester’s acid house scene and neglects the black and…
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What Sidney Poitier stood for
Burdened by the expectations of black people around the world, the Oscar-winning actor embodied grace even under fire.
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Hemingway: a masterful six-part series from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
This documentary has cast an unlikely spell on me, someone who hitherto has always proved resistant to Ernest’s manly attractions.
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A BBC Radio 4 documentary allows young people to speak directly about their experiences of the pandemic
Adults, Almost mixes anecdotes and interviews with clips recorded in teenagers’ homes, as well as musical and spoken word sequences.
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Tina Turner and the music industry’s obsession with survival stories
A new HBO documentary about Tina Turner shows how her victimhood became a commodity.
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