TV preview: Rude Britannia | Storyville - Sync or Swim

Note: anyone rubbing their hands at the prospect of a physical manifestation of this metaphor will be sorely disappointed.

Instead, this three-part series celebrates nearly 300 years of national vulgarity, from the anarchic tableaux of 18th-century artist William Hogarth to the dismal grotesquery of Little Britain. A sweeping social history told through the work of comedians, artists, satirists and provocateurs, it charts the eternal battle in Britain between irreverent art – whether political, sexual, malicious or benign – and the prudish moral guardians who strive to censor it.

It shows how shifting social values have been reflected and challenged through the often glorious miscegenation of high and low culture, from the bawdy street ballads of the Georgian era – imagine a dirty limerick composed of nothing but single-entendres – to the poetry of Pope, Swift and Byron; Victorian music halls and pornographic peep shows; the saucy seaside postcards of the postwar period; and the increasingly outspoken comedies of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Blessed with insightful contributions from a host of scholars, artists and commentators, including Matthew Sweet, Gerald Scarfe and John Lloyd, it's an interesting and enjoyable series marred only by an unfortunate tendency to paint Britain's working class as trash-guzzling simpletons.

Perhaps I'm being oversensitive, but doesn't the suggestion that "ordinary" British people have always favoured simple – not to mention racist, sexist and homophobic – comedy over relatively sophisticated satire rather play into the hands of the self-righteous snobs targeted in the rest of the series?

This irksome contradiction notwithstanding, Rude Britannia is an otherwise vibrant testament to one of the most laudable facets of the great British character.

The resilience of the human spirit is celebrated in another BBC 4 documentary this week, STORYVILLE – SYNC OR SWIM, which tells the unlikely story of a Swedish all-male synchronised swimming team. Directed by British filmmaker Dylan Williams, it's a personal, poignant and funny treatise on growing old and re-establishing your place in the world.

All pushing 40, the amateur athletes from Stockholm Art Swim Gents (I can only assume their name sounds less clumsy in Swedish) have decided that, rather than grow a ponytail or date a 21-year-old, the best way to surmount a mid-life crisis is to prove their worth in a sport traditionally dominated by women; or, in the words of an almost apoplectic Italian DJ who interviews them: "a sport for homosexuals!"

Since relocating to Sweden for love, Williams has been frustrated by his inability to find substantial work. Desperate to support his family and find a renewed sense of purpose, he falls in with a group of likeminded men with similarly thwarted ambitions. But will synchronised swimming help to kick-start the second half of their lives?

Sincerely dedicated but woefully inadequate, the team spend the first half of the film bickering among themselves in an amusingly deadpan manner, like Spinal Tap in swimming trunks.

Chief among the dissenters is Rickard, a temperamental meatpacker who, with typically Scandinavian jollity, describes the purpose of the team as "a protest against the meaningless of life". If Ingmar Bergman had ever made a film about synchronised swimming, then it would probably have looked a bit like this.

But when the team are given a golden opportunity to prove themselves, the mood brightens as they begin to appreciate the possibilities of their unique bond.

Sync or Swim is a charming film which, although it follows the structure of most sporting documentaries, is far more modest than most. Ultimately, it's about friendship and the small yet significant ways our lives can improve when we least expect it.

A strong week for documentaries continues with TRUE STORIES: WE LIVE IN PUBLIC, a Sundance award-winning profile of internet magnate Josh Harris.

Described in the introduction as "the greatest internet pioneer you've never heard of", Harris was one of the first to recognise the potential of the world wide web. His foresight earned him a multi-million dollar fortune in the 1990s, when he oversaw the world's first interactive internet television network.

And yet Harris's visionary zeal proved to be his undoing as he began to implement outlandish online experiments to validate his prediction that the internet would invade our lives to a troubling degree. Beating Big Brother by a year, he built a chaotic commune in New York – where free drink and drugs meshed disturbingly with an in-house firing range and Stasi-like interrogations – in which more than 100 artists were filmed constantly. He subsequently broadcast every waking hour of his girlfriend and himself in an uncomfortable experiment that killed their relationship. And then, thanks to the dot.com bubble collapse, he lost his entire fortune.

Harris is a fascinating subject, a strange, delusional, messianic, manipulative, immature and attention-seeking man who, as he admits, has lived his entire life in a virtual world of his own devising. You won't like him, but you'll be gripped by his every move. That, after all, is what he lives for.

RUDE BRITANNIA

Monday to Wednesday, BBC 4, 9pm

STORYVILLE – SYNC OR SWIM

Monday, BBC 4, 10pm

TRUE STORIES: WE LIVE IN PUBLIC

Tuesday, More 4, 10pm

This article was first published in The Scotsman on Saturday, June 12, 2010

TV preview: Rude Britannia | Storyville - Sync or Swim | True Stories: We Live in Public