It used to be ever so middle class to deny watching much television. About the only things it was acceptable to say that you viewed were the news, plays and documentaries. It was almost a mark of being educated that you liked documentaries. But, personally speaking, I have real problems with them. In general, documentaries bore me. This can be a bit embarrassing when someone says 'Did you see Horizon on quantum physics?' or 'Did you see that latest David Attenborough?' Because I won't have done. I've never successfully watched a full episode of a David Attenborough documentary. Admittedly it's partly because wildlife films are rarely about science, but I think the main problem is that I'm too word-oriented. I enjoy good story-telling TV, but I find that factual programmes manage to take about two pages of text and stretch it into an hour's worth of documentary. I'd much rather read the two pages. (This is also why I can't be bothered with ...

Channel 4, as is their want, showed an interesting, if slightly eyebrow raising documentary on Sunday about the Alpha Course , the worldwide phenomenon started by Nicky Gumbel in London that claims to give agnostics the chance to find out what life is really about through a particular religion (Christianity). I have heard one or two moans about the way the presenter seemed to go in with a preconceived idea of how the documentary was to turn out. I was interested, as I have been on an Alpha Course, to see how his version compared with my experience. There were several aspects that didn't ring true, though some of these may have been down to the course portrayed being a high power version at St Aldates in Oxford , where the one I attended was a small village affair, held in someone's home. Probably the most doubtful aspect was the claim that part of the course's template was to have food served by (I paraphrase) 'attractive young Christian women.' Having a meal was ce...

A few days ago I made a rare venture into watching BBC3 to see a rather odd little documentary called Gary: Young, Psychic and Possessed . (At the time of writing it's still on iPlayer here .) In it, the filmmaker, Emeka Onono tried to produce an open-minded study of the self-proclaimed psychic healer Gary Mannion. Watching, it was as fascinating for its revelations of the mind of the documentary maker as it was for the work of Mannion. Onono so wanted to believe. This came through particularly strongly when looking at two studies of Mannion. Onono portrayed the work of the (admittedly sometimes rather puerile) website Bad Psychics , which has a great swathe of evidence against Mannion as a personal attack, rather than the useful dissection it is. But when he visited a 'research' establishment that allegedly has some positive results for Mannion, he didn't point out that the Scottish Society for Psychical Research isn't exactly a proper academic institution. ...