Category Archives: Documentary

Stowaway tells how he survived 11-hour flight to UK in new film

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South African man, now known as Justin, speaks for first time of friend Carlito Vale, who died after 430-metre fall, in Channel 4 documentary

A South African man who survived an 11-hour flight from Johannesburg to London after hiding in a plane’s undercarriage has told of the last words he exchanged with a friend whose body fell from the same British Airways flight as it came in to land at Heathrow.

“He said: ‘We made it,’ and then I passed out with the lack of oxygen,” said the man, who was then known as Themba and who has spoken publicly for the first time about the desperate journey both men undertook in 2015.

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‘Like a mission to Mars’: making David Attenborough’s A Perfect Planet

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Disco-dancing crabs, flamingos under a volcano … and a frog freezing itself alive. Behind the scenes of the BBC’s new nature documentary

Ed Charles, producer, Weather and Oceans
We were really lucky on this series in that we had finished our filming and were in the edit when coronavirus hit, so it was something that we could do remotely. I’ve been working on this project since 2016 so it has been a long time in the making.

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Scottie Pippen: ‘I told Michael Jordan I wasn’t too pleased with The Last Dance’

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The ex-Chicago Bulls star won new fans in the acclaimed Netflix documentary. He talks about his special relationship with MJ – and basketball’s equality problem

Born in Arkansas in 1965, the youngest of 12 children, Scottie Pippen is one of basketball’s all-time greats. He played alongside Michael Jordan for the Chicago Bulls when they dominated the sport in the 1990s, winning six NBA championships. (He also won two Olympic gold medals.) That period, the Bulls’ and, in particular Jordan’s, extraordinary achievements are the focus of the 10-part, critically acclaimed Netflix docuseries The Last Dance, which has been a major hit in 2020.

You and Michael Jordan seemed to have a special bond in the film. When you were both on your game, it seemed like the team was going to win. Was that the case?
Yeah, that relationship, we established that we felt like that in the late 80s, playing against the Pistons, just starting to grow and mature and have each other’s backs. We grew up together and we defended each other. That respect we had on the court, that competitiveness we took through to the top – it was special. That was the respect we had for each other, because we had to be on the court to do what we did. We had to be dominant.

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Carole Baskin: ‘After Tiger King, my phone rang every two minutes for months’

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The animal sanctuary owner was catapulted to fame by the Netflix series – and became an unlikely fashion trendsetter

Carole Baskin watched the Netflix documentary series Tiger King as many of us did: she binged it, devouring all seven episodes in one sitting as soon as it was released in March. “It was like watching a dumpster fire, you just couldn’t turn away from it,” says Baskin on a video call. “It was just mesmerising that there could be this many crazy people doing so many wretched things to animals.”

Of course, one of the “crazy people”, the show implied, was her. Baskin, a 59-year-old owner of the Big Cat Rescue sanctuary in Florida, she she had been told by the film-makers that Tiger King would be an exposé of the mistreatment of the animals by private owners in America. Instead, the series mainly focused on a long-running feud between Baskin and Joseph Maldonado-Passage, a mulleted, polygamous, country music-loving zoo owner from Oklahoma who calls himself “Joe Exotic”.

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‘They created a false image’: how the Reagans fooled America

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A new docuseries studies the damaging reign of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and the insidious myth-making that still surrounds their legacy

Ever since Richard Nixon’s sweaty upper lip during a debate with John F Kennedy cost him the election in 1960, television has been the most crucial proving ground for any presidential hopeful. Granting the gift of sight to the general public changed the game, as campaigners and office-holders have been forced to school themselves in careful image management and conscious branding. In American politics, a well-crafted position on foreign policy won’t get a person nearly as far as the easy telegenic charm that makes voters feel comfortable grabbing a pint, a dissonance that’s allowed some dubious characters access to the highest stations of authority.

Related: Ronald Reagan called African UN delegates 'monkeys', recordings reveal

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Trial 4: how a teen spent 22 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit

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Sean Ellis was 19 years old when he was arrested for killing a police officer in Boston. Decades later, he prepares for his fourth trial in Netflix’s Trial 4

Sean Ellis was 19 when he was arrested by Boston police over the killing of an officer in October 1993. Head down and nearly collapsing, barely keeping pace with police, Ellis wore his best suit as officers dragged him into custody – he had just attended the funeral of Celine Kirk and Tracy Brown, his cousins, who had been murdered by Celine’s ex-boyfriend in Ellis’s neighborhood of Dorchester. Ellis had spoken voluntarily to police about his cousins, with whom he was close; days later, he was on trial over the murder of a crooked cop as he slept in his car in a Walgreens parking lot.

Related: A Wilderness of Error: the year's most troubling true crime series

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Explosive interview with Diana leaves one big question: how was it secured?

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Story of BBC journalist Martin Bashir’s dealings with Princess of Wales is of searing public interest

It was just six days before transmission that Buckingham Palace learned that the BBC’s Panorama programme was to broadcast Martin Bashir’s compelling, explosive – and now highly controversial – interview with Diana, Princess of Wales.

In the palace press office, there was dismay and resignation. “Then everybody looked at each other and said: ‘Martin who?’” recalled Dickie Arbiter, then an assistant palace press secretary.

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Angry TV film-makers stop release of lauded Iranian documentary

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Coup 53, which charts MI6’s role in the shah’s restoration, has been blocked by makers of an 1985 show, who say it sullies their names

Coup 53 was heralded by critics this summer as a “powerful and authoritative” documentary “as gripping as any thriller”, and judged by historians as crucial to understanding Britain’s relationship with the Middle East.

Made over 10 years by Walter Murch, the celebrated editor of Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, in collaboration with the Anglo-Iranian director Taghi Amirani, it tells the story of covert British intervention in Iran after the second world war and stars Ralph Fiennes, left, as an MI6 spy in a reconstruction of a key incident.

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American Apparel ‘used fake comments to fuel founder’s bad boy image’

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Ex-worker tells documentary series staff would post on articles about Dov Charney

A documentary series has revealed how American Apparel helped fuel its founder’s bad boy mythology in order to bolster interest in the clothing company online.

In the nine-part Big Rad Wolf, a former employee reveals she would leave approved fake comments under salacious articles about Dov Charney on celebrity media blogs such as Gawker and Jezebel, in order to manufacture his reputation as predatory.

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Sue Perkins: Along the US-Mexico Border review – darkness leavened with a dash of wit

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More of a travelogue than a documentary, Perkins begins in the border town of Tijuana, where she finds tequila-fuelled parties sit uneasily alongside the scale of asylum seekers’ suffering

Watching Sue Perkins present a programme always brings to mind the moment in Blackadder when Edmund, in financial straits, is showing prospective buyers around his home. “You’ve really worked out your banter, haven’t you?” says one of them. “No, not really,” replies Blackadder. “This is a different thing – it’s spontaneous, and it’s called wit.”

Wit is Perkins’ USP. All presenters have warmth and intelligence, though both can vary in degree and kind, and in the proportions in which they are blended. But it is Perkins’ ability to think on her feet – and, I suppose, the willingness of her editors to keep it in and not flatten her into traditional affectlessness – that marks her (and the likes of Grayson Perry and Paul O’Grady when he lets rip) out. It adds zest to proceedings. This is always welcome, even when – as with last night’s opening episode of the two-part Sue Perkins: Along the US-Mexico Border (BBC One) – the programme’s subject matter is notably colourful stuff on its own.

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The week in TV: Lovecraft Country; African Renaissance; Manctopia and more

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Horrors of all kinds abound in HBO’s brilliant new drama; Afua Hirsch explores African history; and inside the mind of Derren Brown

Lovecraft Country (Sky Atlantic) | sky.com
African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power (BBC Four) | BBC iPlayer
Handmade in Africa (BBC Four) | BBCiPlayer
Derren Brown: 20 Years of Mind Control (Channel 4) | 4oD
Manctopia: Billion Pound Property Boom (BBC Two) | BBC iPlayer

Lovecraft Country was, in its ambitions and its potential heft, already a phenomenon just on paper. Add in the presence of JJ Abrams and Jordan Peele as executive producers, along with a sublime cast of strength in depth, and it landed on our screens last week with a burnished gleam of unmistakable triumph. It is that rare thing: a show that can deliver gut-punch messages of contempt (and hope), yet which remembers throughout that it’s a drama, keeping one thrillingly on the edge, ripe and reeking with surprise.

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MI6, the coup in Iran that changed the Middle East, and the cover-up

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Documentary reveals evidence confirming a British spy’s role in restoring the Shah in 1953 – and how the Observer exposed the plot

The hidden role of a British secret service officer who led the coup that permanently altered the Middle East is to be revealed for the first time since an Observer news story was suppressed in 1985.

The report, headlined “How MI6 and CIA joined forces to plot Iran coup”, appeared in the 26 May edition but was swiftly quashed. It exposed the fact that an MI6 man, Norman Darbyshire, had run a covert and violent operation to reinstate the Shah of Iran as ruler of the country in 1953. Yet just a few days after the newspaper came out, all fresh evidence of this British operation and of Darbyshire’s identity disappeared from public debate.

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‘Sensational’ Egypt find offers clues in hunt for Cleopatra’s tomb

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Exclusive: discovery of two ancient mummies filmed for Channel 5 documentary

She was the fabled queen of ancient Egypt, immortalised over thousands of years as a beautiful seductress. But, despite her fame, Cleopatra’s tomb is one of the great unsolved mysteries.

Some believe she was buried in Alexandria, where she was born and ruled from her royal palace, a city decimated by the tsunami of 365AD. Others suggest her final resting place could be about 30 miles away, in the ancient temple of Taposiris Magna, built by her Ptolemaic ancestors on the Nile Delta.

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Tiger King’s Carole Baskin handed control of Joe Exotic’s zoo

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Baskin, whose rivalry with Exotic was documented in the Netflix hit, is now the owner of the Oklahoma premises following court proceedings

Beleaguered zoo owner Joe Exotic, subject of Netflix’s hit documentary series Tiger King, has now suffered the indignity of rival Carole Baskin gaining control of what was once his zoo. Baskin, a self-styled conservationist and owner of the Big Cat Rescue facility in Hillsborough County, Florida, has been given control of the Wynnewood, Oklahoma premises by courts, after Exotic failed to pay her $1m in copyright and trademark suits.

Exotic – real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage – is currently in prison, having been found guilty of 17 counts of animal abuse and a murder-for-hire plot against Baskin, and sentenced to 22 years.

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‘It’s outrageous’: inside an infuriating Netflix series on Jeffrey Epstein

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Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich synthesizes legal information with first-person testimony of the billionaire’s abuse and bought immunity into a shocking watch

It’s difficult to watch Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a four-hour Netflix series on the now-deceased convicted sex offender without a choking sense of outrage. How many girls had to suffer to get attention? How perversely twisted is the American justice system that a Gatsby-esque billionaire, friends with such powerful figures as Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump, a longstanding donor to Harvard and MIT, could buy his way out of an almost certain life sentence for child sex abuse and trafficking?

Filthy Rich arrives, of course, less than a year after Epstein, 66, died, officially by suicide, in a New York jail last August. “There’s no justice in this,” Shawna Rivera, speaking publicly for the first time about Epstein’s alleged abuse starting when she was 14, says in the final episode. “There was just so much more to be said that will never be said.”

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People opened up because I’m the Beavis and Butt-head guy’: Mike Judge on his new funk direction

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The writer-director’s comedies – from Office Space to Silicon Valley – always sum up the spirit of their times. So why has he made an LSD-soaked cartoon about George Clinton and Bootsy Collins?

Few writer-directors have been as consistent and ruthless at capturing the moment as Mike Judge, although he never actually intends to do so. “It’s always a shock when something comes out and it feels so relevant,” he says, in his laconic surfer-dude tone, talking to me by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “But I tend to look at stuff that feels as if it’s everywhere, but nobody’s talking about.”

Judge, 57, is so beady at spotting what’s everywhere, his shows themselves end up becoming ubiquitous, the thing everybody’s talking about. It is impossible to imagine 90s TV without his seminal hits, Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, the former satirising the worst of youth culture, the latter fondly depicting gentle American conservatism acclimatising itself to the Bill Clinton era.

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Prince Andrew will reportedly not be interviewed in Epstein documentary

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Duke of York will not appear in upcoming Lifetime film on Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and sex offender

Prince Andrew will reportedly not agree to be interviewed for a forthcoming documentary about the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The Duke of York has been repeatedly criticized for associating with Epstein, who died in custody in New York following his July 2019 arrest on sex trafficking charges.

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What happened after Netflix quarantine smash Tiger King ended?

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The phenomenally successful docuseries about tigers, criminals and polygamy has led to memes, celebrity fans and a newly awakened legal case

In the century since March began, one series has emerged as the go-to distraction for the millions now sequestered in their living rooms: Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. The bizarre documentary series on a feud between big cat owners, as well as about 95 other things, has been the No 1 program on Netflix’s US platform since it premiered less than two weeks ago. And though the news and social media remain dominated by coronavirus coverage, the five hours of drama between outlandish characters in the disturbing American trade of private zoos has proved to be strange and fittingly unhinged counter-programming. Everywhere (online) you look: if it’s not about the pandemic, it’s probably Tiger King.

Related: Murder, madness and tigers: behind the year's wildest Netflix series

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The Real Michael Jackson review – how did he get away with it for so long?

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The ‘Wacko Jacko’ persona was a deliberate ruse to cover a much darker truth, says Jacques Peretti as he examines his own complicity in letting the pop star off the hook

If you keep wondering what to think about Michael Jackson’s complicated legacy – is it OK to play Billie Jean at a party? Do you have to switch radio stations if Smooth Criminal comes on? – imagine how Jacques Peretti feels. He has made three films about the pop icon in the past 15 years and in this, his fourth, he aimed to build the fullest picture yet. But how many of us are brave enough to confront that picture?

The Real Michael Jackson (BBC Two) comes just over a year after the broadcast of HBO/Channel 4’s Leaving Neverland, a gruelling, four-hour documentary built around the detailed accounts of two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who say they were sexually abused by Jackson as children. Peretti’s film was initially billed as a rival Jackson film, but in the event, it’s much more like an unofficial sequel; a film that could not exist if Leaving Neverland hadn’t cleared the media’s hagiographic haze, but which also provides necessary context on the huge fallout from Jackson’s 2009 death.

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The Sultan’s Trail was good practice for lockdown | Adrian Chiles

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My experience on the Sultan’s trail found that two Christians, two Muslims, a Jew and two atheists could live peaceably together, although the mountain scenery seems a lifetime away now

Back in early autumn I went on a pilgrimage from Belgrade to Istanbul with six others to film a television programme that airs on Friday. At the best of times, the mountains of Bulgaria would feel a lifetime away, but now it all feels so much further.

I took part because I enjoy talking about faith, and love walking. Our route was part of the Sultan’s Trail, a long-distance footpath from Vienna to Istanbul. It marks the 16th-century marches taken by Suleiman the Magnificent and his Ottoman armies as they conquered Belgrade and most of Hungary before the Viennese held out against them. The trail is styled the “path of peace”, along which all cultures and religions can come together.

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