TV preview: A Life Through The Lens: David Peat | Secret History Of Our Streets

AT the end of a rather fine one, film-maker David Peat says, “People have never stopped loving documentaries because they educate, they illustrate, they illuminate … A good documentary opens eyes, takes people into a physical place or an emotional journey that they couldn’t possibly witness or see for themselves … [showing them] remarkable people who have just great tales to tell.”

That’s the ideal; sometimes it feels as if that’s no longer true, in a time when “structured reality” is a genre and not a satire, and serious reportage is often underfunded and shunted to minority channels. In gloomy moments, I wonder if viewers still have the patience for gentle, reflective documentaries like Peat specialised in. But the success of recent shows like One Born Every Minute, 56 Up or Educating Essex shows that there’s still an appetite for real lives.

And hopefully, for the lovely portrait that is A LIFE THROUGH THE LENS, filmed in the last months of Peat’s life – he had terminal cancer. He was hardly a household name, but many of his films will ring a bell, having captured pieces of time and place since the 1970s. His first big break was as a 24-year-old cameraman filming the UCS work-in, around for Jimmy Reid’s famous “no bevvying” speech and becoming caught up in the events as more than a dispassionate observer. “We believed in the spirit of what was happening on the Clyde,” he says, “and we in our funny wee daft telly way were helping to contribute to the saving of that.” Our funny wee daft telly way: how endearingly Scottish is that?

While the discussions of his old films, which include one on the fishing industry, a cancer hospice and the Monktonhall colliery buy-out, are interesting, the heart of this documentary is not the worlds Peat filmed but his own fascination with them. There’s a touching moment when he’s reunited with Jim Parker, who led the miners and let the film crew into the cramped space underground to tell their story. As Peat gets carried away remembering how little space there was and how tricky it was to film, Parker interrupts: “You’re still there yet, you’re missing doing your filming more than I’m missing the pits, aren’t you? That’s what made us choose you [to make the film], it’s obvious, no’ think so?” And Peat, who died shortly afterwards, laughs, walks away, then laughs again at how right he is.

I think Peat would have enjoyed The Secret History Of Our Streets, a new series about changes to seven streets in London, chuckling at the unintentionally ironic opening: “London in 1886: then the largest city in human history and the centre of the known world. With its self-importance, its dirt, its wealth and awful poverty, it seems a mystery to us now.” Self-important, socially divided London seeing itself as the centre of the world – surely not!

Actually though, even if you’ve never been down Deptford High Street, the first subject, there is much to recognise in this account of how a once-thriving market area was labelled a slum, bulldozed in a frenzy of modern town planning which destroyed the community and is now one of the poorest high streets in the capital. One family which has run a stall or shop there for 250 years, feel they’ve been overlooked even as bids were made to improve things.

But if people in the 1950s got some things wrong, at least they got something right, according to Professor Brendon Walker in The House The 50s Built. Because apparently the dummy house built for the programme “will reveal how a black and white Britain was transformed into a Technicolor wonderland”. Yes, before people had red Formica worktops and pink melamine dinner plates, life was a dreary monochrome rut. By the end of the decade, thanks to twin tubs, Kenwood Chefs – invented, I’m delighted to learn, by a Mr Ken Wood – and fridges, women in particular were freed from domestic slavery and able to embrace the joys of colour for the first time.

Prof Walker demonstrates how just 15 minutes of 1950-type housework used as many calories as an aerobics class would burn but by 1960 labour-saving gadgets could do it all.

The only problem, of course, is that now you switch on your washing machine and have to use the time saved to go to an aerobics class.

• A Life Through The Lens: David Peat

Tuesday, BBC2, 9pm

• The Secret History Of Our Streets

Wednesday, BBC2, 9pm

• The House The 50s Built

Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm