documentary

BBC’s Defying the Label season won’t change prejudice overnight says Adam Pearson

The programme is part of BBC Three’s Defying the Label season, which aims to explore disability, poverty, hate crime, sex and romance in 15 specialist programmes over four weeks.

Yet Pearson, a former BBC and Channel 4 researcher who also starred in Channel 4’s Beauty and the Beast, argues that the BBC season is a ‘double-edged sword’. While there’s been progress in discussing disability on primetime TV, Pearson hopes to get to a stage where disabled people can appear on screen without “the need for a special season or with such a big song and dance”.

Memories of a world at war

The World at War
Four years in the making and, at the time, the UK’s most expensive series, The World at War remains TV’s greatest documentary.  

 

Knitted together by Laurence Olivier’s narration and a Carl Davis score, the programme movingly tells the story of the Second World War using eyewitness accounts and interviews with important figures, including Albert Speer and Lord Mountbatten.