Parky at the Pictures (DVD 25/4/2013)

By far the most important and most enduring reform that followed the Labour landslide in the general election of July 1945 was the establishment of the National Health Service and the pride with which doctors like Julian Tudor Hart and Harry Keen and nurses like Eileen Thompson, Dena Murphy and Margaret Battin still speak of its inauguration is every bit as moving as the recollections of Scouse sailor Sam Watts and Welsh miner Ray Davies about the loss of family members because their fathers couldn't afford doctors' bills. Indeed, this sense of sharing in the creation of a land not only fit for heroes, but also one that was egalitarian and just saw the implementation of the `cradle to grave' welfare state recommended in the Beveridge Report greeted with similar enthusiasm, as unemployment and sickness benefits were introduced alongside the family allowance and a new system of old-age pensions.

The passage of the New Towns Act in 1946 and the Town and Country Planning Act in 1947 saw the thousands leave the bombsites and slums of the inner cities for affordable council housing that came with electricity, running water and indoor privies. Many estates were built close to parks, shops and schools, as well as places of employment in the newly nationalised industries. By 1951, Britain's coal mines, railway and canal networks, steel mills and key utilities had been taken into public ownership. Yet, while this led to wage increases, reduced hours and improvements in working conditions, it largely left what one interviewee calls `the same old gang back in power', as the heads of the private companies were asked to supervise the transformation. 

Sadly, such failings are largely overlooked here, along with Attlee's mixed handling of the economy and the first stages of the divestiture of Empire. The miseries of rationing are also glossed over in favour of rose-tinted reminiscences about the Festival of Britain. But this is unfortunately typical of a film that consistently opts for sweeping statements and blithe generalisations. The notion that there was a single `spirit of `45' is itself a myth, even though most people were keen to avoid a return to the bad old days of the Depression. Indeed, many of the reforms claimed as socialist triumphs had their roots in legislation passed by the Liberal governments of Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Herbert Asquith between 1906-14 or were recommended by commissions set up by the wartime coalition led by Winston Churchill.

But any propagandist agenda pursued in lauding the work of Attlee and such key ministers as Aneurin Bevan and Herbert Morrison is dwarfed by the ferocity of the assault on Margaret Thatcher, who is accused of dismantling the Labour legacy almost single-handedly against the wishes of the vast majority of the British people. Of course, this approach ignores the seismic shifts in national and international social, political and economic affairs in the intervening period and the fact that the policies of both Labour and Conservative governments contributed to the country finding itself in a `winter of discontent' in 1978-79. Moreover, it also sidesteps the problem that New Labour had plenty of time between 1997 and 2010 to re-seize the socialist initiative under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Thus, stating that a return to the spirit of 1945 would help set Britain on the road to recovery in 2013 is dismayingly naive, even though few would disagree that the unchecked capitalism that landed us in our current predicament needs reining in. What's more, there is something slightly patronising about the generations who subsequently squandered the opportunities created by Attlee and his cabinet lecturing the youth of today about how best to solve problems they inherited rather than caused. For a lifelong Labour supporter, this commendable, but misdirected film makes for deeply disconcerting viewing. Its attempts to rewrite history are blinkered and clumsy and do a monumental disservice to the ordinary men and women who met the challenges the country faced in the aftermath of the Second World War. Ken Loach's intentions couldn't have been nobler. But his methodology leaves a lot to be desired.

That said, there is no denying the passion of the speakers he has assembled and photographed in solemnising monochrome, whether they are activists, academics, dockers, doctors, miners, nurses, politicians or union officials. It's a shame no one was canvassed from Scotland, Northern Ireland, the North-East, the Midlands or the vast swathes of rural Britain. But the voice of the people comes through loud and clear, thanks to Welshman Dai Walters, Liverpudlians Tony Mulhearn, Doreen McNally, Terry Teague, John Farrell and Terry Nelson, Mancunian Karen Reissmann, Sheffielders Bill Ronksley, Ray Jackson, David Hopper, Stan Pearce, Inky Thomson, Simon Midgley and Adrian Dilworth, and Londoners Dot Gibson, Deborah Garvie, James Meadway, John Rees, June Hautot, Raphie de Santos, Anthony Richardson, Alan Thornett, Jacky Davis, Jonathon Tomlinson, Ray Thorne, Alex Gordon and Tony Benn.

Archivist Jim Anderson (who worked similar miracles on Terence Davies's Of Time and the City in 2008) also deserves enormous credit for the splendid period footage, while George Fenton contributes another of his astute scores. But there is no avoiding the fact that this isn't a documentary or a history lesson. It isn't even a polemic; it's a party political broadcast on behalf of a cause that ceased to exist in 1955.

It seems odd to think that Beatlemania would erupt within eight years of this date and it is even more peculiar for those of a certain age to realise that half a century has elapsed since then. But, if you can get over the shock of how fast time disappears and are still in the mood for some untainted nostalgia, the BFI has released Roundabout: A Year in Colour - 1963, which assembles 11 of the monthy cine-magazines that the Central Office of Information sponsored largely for south and south-east Asian consumption. However, don't expect so see anything here on Merseybeat, the defection of Kim Philby, the resignation of Harold Macmillian as prime minister, the issuing of the Beeching Report, the Great Train Robbery, the Profumo Affair, the death of CS Lewis on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated or the launch of Doctor Who on BBC1.

Like Carrousel (for Latin America) and Parade (for Africa and the Caribbean), Roundabout was designed to bind Commonwealth countries closer to Britain by emphasising the partnerships that were vital to the peace and prosperity of all. Produced in conjunction with Associated British - Pathé, the pilot was tested in June 1961 and the debut issue was released in May the following year. Paternalistic in tone, but nowhere near as patronising as much postwar propaganda had been, it was shown in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaya, Borneo and Laos, with French, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai and Malay commentaries being made available, as well as the English-language version. Some two million people were believed to have seen the launch edition and, if it hadn't exactly become an institution, it had largely been accepted as part of the Asian cinematic landscape by 1963.

The January instalment of that year compared the architecture of London, Jakarta and Saigon and celebrated the craft of the goldsmith before closing on a riding display at Windsor Castle by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. An item on the Ardmore racing track in New Zealand led the way in February, alongside footage of Mini and Vauxhall Viva production back in Blighty and an insight into the importance of rubber in the emerging pastime of scuba diving. The use of Malayan palm kernels to feed farm animals in the north east of England dominated the March slate, which also touched upon powerboats, Australian sheep shearers and army dispatch riders.

In keeping with the tactic of showing how raw materials from around the Commonwealth were utilised in Britain, the April programme went from Asian forests to a British furniture factory. Shots of the wife of the Indonesian ambassador visiting Hampton Court preceded trips to the newly opened Commonwealth Institute in London and the Edinburgh Tattoo. Competing for attention in May were snippets on the opening of Hong Kong's Kaitak airport, tours around the Royal Mint and a tobacco factory and demonstrations by the Army Physical Training Corps and a mountain rescue unit.

Cigarettes, gliding, water-skiing, boat building and book printing fill June's nine minutes, while fish, milk, polyurethane foam and a new stand at Ascot racecourse occupy the July slot. Harking back to one of the great documentaries of the 1930s, the August schedule starts with a feature on tea growing in Ceylon and there's time to drop into the Ideal Home Exhibition before tributes are paid to the oil drillers of Brunei, the ivory carvers of Hong Kong and the London Fire Brigade.

Rather bizarrely, the September issue was never made. So, we move into October in the company of new series narrator Brian Cobby (who would go on to become the first male voice of the Speaking Clock), who tells us all about an Aussie rodeo, the centenary of the Hong Kong postal service, London's Industrial Health and Safety Centre and the new Kenwood mixer before leaving us to enjoy a speeded-up trip filmed through the windscreen of a car.

Fittingly, the famous Wayang Kulit puppets that played a part in the prehistory of the moving image preface November's visit to the Pinewood Studios set of Val Guest's smallpox thriller, 80,000 Suspects, before the focus falls on hydroelectricity, light bulbs, mushrooms and recent developments in aviation. Finally, the annual Sarawak regatta gets things under way in December, with an item on teaching dead children in Burma being bookended by tours around factories making sweets and dolls.

Quite what the target audiences would have made of these quaint curios is left to the imagination. But, given that much indigenous film production in the region was still in monochrome, these Technicolor missives would undoubtedly have retained a novelty value until the series was cancelled in 1974. Moreover, they provide a fascinating snapshot of everyday life at opposite ends of the Earth five decades ago and demonstrate how much it has shrunk in the interim.

By contrast, Julien Temple seeks to fuse hundreds of images from a century of the capital's history in London: The Modern Babylon to show how ordinary people shaped the destiny and personality of the metropolis that once dictated the fate of a sizeable proportion of humanity. Putting a punk spin on the `city symphony' format that has striven to capture the dynamism of urban existence since the silent era, this mesmerising montage is accompanied by a driving soundtrack that provides an ironic commentary on visuals that have been meticulously researched and slickly assembled to reaffirm Dr Johnson's contention that anyone tired of London is tired of life.

Pride of place goes to Hetty Bower, a 106 year-old from Hackney who sets the anti-nostalgic tone by recalling that a day trip to Tower Bridge was a significant childhood treat. She also remembers waving off the troops at Dalston Junction in 1914 and playing her part in the Battle of Cable Street, when East Enders resisted a march by Sir Osward  Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Indeed, conflict plays a crucial part in London's recent past, whether it brought Home Secretary Winston Churchill to Stepney for the 1911 showdown between the police and an anarchist gang in the Siege of Sidney Street or sent him as Prime Minister into the neighbourhoods decimated by the Luftwaffe during the 1940 Blitz.

What is most striking about these early sequences is the squalor endured by the masses in the first third of the last century, with Temple using footage from the films of Harry B. Parkinson and the members of the 1930s British Documentary Movement to show the appalling conditions in the crowded slums and reinforce the insight of Madness singer Suggs that `there were no good old days'. That said, there was certainly a heyday, particularly on the wharves of the docklands that sustained the trading empire. Tony Benn remembers being taught that the world was divided into the British and foreigners and his quip that there always seemed to be a lot of the latter highlights the role that immigrants have always played in the city's prosperity, whether they were Irish, Jewish, West Indian or Asian.

Temple avoids easy clichés about melting pots, however, and the inclusion of an anecdote about a boy of Caribbean extraction having his 11-plus scholarship withdrawn and handed to a white classmate eloquently sums up the injustices and prejudices that have kept racial tensions simmering. Yet, Temple doesn't necessarily see strife as a bad thing and he juxtaposes footage of the 2011 riots with an archive clip of Malcolm McLaren averring that the `London Mob' is a force that the authorities should ignore at its peril.

This thesis seems pertinent in the context of the shifting cultural and fashion trends that prompted the emergence of hippies, punks, New Romantics and rappers. But Temple places too much emphasis on restless youth in the final third of the film and loses sight of the quotidian majority in the inner city and the suburbs who keep the city ticking. Moreover, he seems to set greater store by the opinions of artists like poet Michael Horovitz and The Kinks frontman Ray Davies than representatives of the political, administrative, financial or commercial sectors. Short shrift is also afforded to ordinary Londoners. But these are minor quibbles considering the acuity of Temple's editing and the wit and trenchancy of montages that convey the ever-changing face of London and its remarkable capacity for absorbing disparate peoples and forging them into thriving, pulsating and sometimes fractious communities.

Eager to prove that same point, the estimable Marc Isaacs embarks upon a journey along the A5 on meeting aspiring singer Keelta O'Higgins off the Irish ferry at Holyhead in the opening scene of The Road: A Story of Life and Death. However, instead of picking up stories along the 260 miles of a route that partially follows the old Roman thoroughfare of Watling Street, Isaacs seems to decide there is no place like home and opts instead to examine the immigrant experience of seven people residing in his own Cricklewood and Maida Vale neck of the London woods. The resulting profiles are often compelling and poignant. But not all are accorded equal screen time and, consequently, a couple of characters rather drift off the radar, while the director's presence, both on the other side of the camera and in the voiceovers that serve as structural glue and philosophising soapbox, can be more than a little intrusive.

Having filmed for some 18 months, Isaacs interweaves fragments from his different storylines to create a living mosaic. However, it is more convenient to consider each subject in turn. Arriving with in Britain with a guitar, a suitcase, a pillow and her security blanket, Keelta hopes to make her name as a musician. But, while she gets warm applause for singing to the regulars at the Cricklewood pub in which she works and occasionally gets to guest with gigging bands, she seems to spend more time pulling pints than pursuing her dream. Almost as an afterthought, Isaacs films her at what appears to be an audition and she seems to do well. But her fate is far from clear as the picture ends.

Sadly, the same isn't true of compatriot Billy Leahy, an alcoholic who hasn't returned home in 42 years, during which time he built roads, laid pipes and worked on the Channel Tunnel. However, he has struggled to cope since his retirement and is now invariably `a day late and a pound short'. Lunching each day at a charity kitchen, he laments the decline of the local Irish community and shrugs at the failure of his attempts to play house and the breakdown in communication with his two sisters back home and a brother around the corner. Gulping down hooch in his kitchen and chiding himself for the mornings he has lost through over-indulgence, Billy lies on his bed and wistfully recalls the camaraderie of the rail gangs, which stands in stark contrast to the bitter reality that nobody noticed his absence for three days after he died and only a handful of mourners attended his wake.

Ninety-five year-old Peggy Roth found old age much more to her liking. She fled Vienna before the Anschluss and never saw her mother again, but she is convinced she has always watched over her and is now keeping her alive. Nearly blind, Peggy takes a nasty fall in the street, but carries on regardless. Indeed, little has bothered her since becoming a widow four years ago, as while she once adored the man she met in wartime London, he grew miserable, demanding and cruel after they married and she freely admits she was glad to lose him to Alzheimer's, as she can now devote herself to her classical music and her cat.

However, as the camera roves around a cosy home full of photographs and mementoes, it becomes evident that Peggy has died and, at the funeral, her granddaughter gives a pair of her favourite earrings to the Oriental cook from the nearby health food store, who had brought Peggy food every day. A year later, family and friends gather for the dedication of her headstone, which quite pointedly omits the word `wife' from a legend that reads: Adored mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and mother-in-law.'

Middle-aged German Brigitte Krafczyk also proved to be unlucky in love, as husband Royston Myers had an affair with her best friend while she was away working as an air hostess. However, even though they are now divorced, they still reside at the hostel she runs for language students. As she explains, they are bound by family love rather than personal passion and she turns a blind eye to his frequent dates and cold admission that he probably never loved her. Outgoing and interested in people, Brigitte makes a genial landlady, although she enjoys having a bolt-hole in which to hide away. She misses the excitement, glamour and companionship of flying, but is determined to make a success of her new enterprise.

The same eagerness to succeed drives Iqbal Ahmed, a dapper concierge at the Marriott Hotel in Maida Vale, who is reminded of his home in Kashmir by a Muharram procession in honour of Imam Hussein at Marble Arch. He believes people are twice disappointed on leaving the land of their birth, as they leave behind everything they have ever known and then find their new abode fails to live up to expectations. Having only been married for seven months, his day revolves around Skype conversations with new wife Asia, who is awaiting clearance to join him in London. He cuts a lonely figure as he goes about his duties and cycles home in the small hours at the end of his shift. But his fervent wish is granted when Asia is granted residency.

Such contentment seems at a premium across the road from Brigitte's premises, where a trio of Maghrebi men sing karaoke in the Horn of Africa café. One of them (seemingly called Sacha) is seen waiting on Sheldon Road in the hope he will be offered a day's work by one of the many van drivers scouting for cheap labour. He complains that British people are kinder to their pets than migrants, but Isaacs opts against following up this line of inquiry (which, to some extent, he has already considered in All White in Barking, 2007) and turns his attention instead to the fact that the A5 was a road to enlightenment trodden by medieval pilgrims and, while Collingwood and Burnt Oak don't feel like holy places, there are still pockets of sanctity.

Among them is the ordinary suburban house in which Burmese exile Nomm Raj prepares meals for the Venerable Uuttara and his fellow Buddhist monks at the end of their meditation fasts. A week after Nomm decides to become part of the order, Isaacs catches up with him and shows him praying before an altar bedecked in flashing lights in honour of the Buddha and striding out in the park, as he tries to keep up physically and spiritually with his new mentors. It is revealed that he will have to renounce his wife back in Burma, but claims it is worth making the commitment in order to start preparing for the next life now.

Despite refraining from overt judgements, Isaacs makes his opinions of the various protagonists pretty plain. But what will frustrate many viewers is the absence of both a unifying thesis and a sociological context for those not au fait with the neighbourhoods under discussion. The individuals themselves come across reasonably well, but the emphasis falls firmly on Billy and Peggy and, unsurprisingly, their passing provides the most poignant moments. Thus, this is much more a `story of life and death' than a study of `the road' , whose full historical and continuing social, economic and cultural significance still tantalisingly awaits analysis.

An almost unrecognisable Britain emerges in Your Children and You, the BFI's eighth delve into the archives of the Central Office of Information. The emphasis here is on films produced in the immediate postwar period to help a nation undergoing a baby boom cope with the problems of parenthood. Having spent six years fighting the Nazis or working in vital industries, men and women were more than a little out of practice when it came to child rearing. There were also thousands of children who had been orphaned during the conflict and guidance was needed on how best to meet their needs. Moreover, RA Butler's 1944 Education Act had transformed the schools system and the COI evidently felt that parents, teachers and children alike required some assistance in coming to terms with the changes.

Complete with a score by William Alwyn, Your Children and You (1946) sets the tone, as director Brian Smith makes astute use of a witty commentary to explain such parenting basics as diet, discipline and keeping inquiring minds entertained. By contrast, Margaret Thompson adopts an observational style in Children Growing Up With Other People (1947), which examines how children interact with each other and respond to adults. Audiences at the time would have been used to a commentary explaining the imagery, but such is Thompson's insight that the scenes of infants playing and adolescents enduring emotional growing pains are readily accessible.

Austrian exile Alex Strasser (who had photographed many of Richard Massingham's public information comedies) teams up with producer John Taylor for Your Children's Meals (1947), which offers advice on how to make rationed items go further and how attractively presented food stands a better chance of being polished off than stodgy mash and gravy. Suggesting how family meals at regular times are vital to a happy home, this will amuse some and appal others with its unabashed chauvinism. However, even though mother knows her place, she is still allowed to chide granny for ruining little appetites with sweets.

The tripartite system of grammar, secondary technical and secondary modern is outlined in The Three A's: A County Modern School (1947), which was filmed in Allertonshire County Modern School in Yorkshire. Stressing the importance of aptitude, age and ability to improving teaching and learning, this is a reworking of a 1944 Colonial Film Unit short on the Education Act and its plea to stay patient because the schools and teachers promised by Butler are still being built and trained. Animators John Halas and Joy Batchelor take up a similar theme, while also examining the Eleven Plus and the concept of free and compulsory schooling for all aged 16 and under, in Charley Junior's Schooldays (1949), which features a quiffed scamp who became a familiar figure to postwar audiences.

But the most striking pair in this engaging, if never exactly compelling collection are Jane Massy's Your Children's Sleep (1948) and Margaret Thompson's A Family Affair (1950). The former presents case studies of troubled kids like Tommy, who is overexcited by the prospect of being signed by Tottenham Hostpur, and Madge, who is too scared to sleep because she witnessed an incident and doesn't know what to do for the best. However, in seeking to understand why Claire wets the bed and wakes up screaming, Massy recreates nightmare using coils of wire moving around a checkered grid.

Among the few women film-makers then working in Britain, the Australian-born Thompson has a circuitous connection to Oxford, as she coached Ashmoleon curator Jon Whiteley to his juvenile Oscar in The Kidnappers (1953). She certainly creates a more reassuring mood in her study of fostering, in which a boarding-out officer explains how the 1948 Children Act has been designed to help the 56,000 youngsters in residential care homes. He calls for volunteers to become guardians and wonders why anyone would not want to help the likes of siblings Ruth and Grace, who were abandoned by their father when their mother died of TB, or Fred and Mary, who respectively want to work in the country and attend a good grammar school.

Although a decade had elapsed, many still lived in care homes and Children's Society: Aunts and Uncles (1960) tells the deeply moving story of young Joe's first holiday, with a volunteer couple whose suitcases dwarf him as he stands on the pavement in unimaginable excitement.  And this two-minute delight ties in neatly with Child Welfare (1962), which four women named Carr, Atkins, Forest and Brown (who is a widow) guide viewers through the various benefits to which children were entitled after the Beveridge Report. Everything from antenatal classes to fostering is covered and the sight of cod liver oil and free school milk will doubtless be enough to turn the stomach of many a child of the 1960s. Yet, given the austerity measures currently being introduced, this rather stolid film makes for arresting viewing, especially as it seems to be much more enlightened and egalitarian in its insistence that every child deserves a chance to make something of their lives.

Some things haven't changed, however, as the Department of Psychology at Edinburgh University continues to assess the kind of juvenile behaviour under scrutiny in Children's Thought and Language (1971). Reporting on a five-year programme monitoring the use of language and logic in a pre-school nursery, this adopts a dry, academic tone. But the responses of the toddlers to the games with shapes and a talking panda asking if they can distinguish between `same' and `different' is rather charming. Susannah York's narration is also a touch prosaic in Test Tube Babies (1985), an edition of the television series A Woman's Place that was produced by the COI for overseas sale. The subject is fertility and the role that Mary Warnock played in removing the stigma that was still attached to in vitro fertilisation over seven years after the birth of the first so-called `test tube baby', Louise Brown. In addition to profiling Warnock, the film also accompanies childless couple Frances and Mark to the private Bourn Hall clinic that had been founded by IVF pioneers Patrick Steptoe and the late Robert Edwards. It's a hopeful note on which to end the selection, but this is always much more socially, scientifically and culturally than cinematically significant.

A child is, of course, key to the action in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining. But this is just one of the topics touched upon by Rodney Ascher in Room 237. There have been several incarnations of Kubrick's take on Stephen King's bestselling novel since it first appeared in 1980. Indeed, British and American audiences saw markedly different versions of the story about a blocked writer slowly losing his mind while working as a caretaker at a remote hotel. However, a restored edition containing all 24 minutes of the footage that has been excised at various times has now been released and fans will be keen to return to this riveting documentary, which considers the different interpretations of the film that have emerged over the past three decades.

Journalist Bill Blakemore recalls seeing The Shining in a plush venue on Leicester Square and being immediately intrigued by the notion that Kubrick had used King's tale to decry the genocide of the Native American population. He was first taken by the wording of the poster, which alluded to `the wave of terror that swept across America'. But he was finally convinced by the placement in the dry goods store of a jar of Calumet baking soda, as this not only bore an image of a `Red Indian' on the label, but also took its name from the French word for a `peace pipe'.

Playwright Juli Kearns also noticed the diverse references to Native American culture, but drew completely different conclusions from them. However, at this stage of the documentary, she is merely content to say that she disagreed with the critics who had branded the picture a disappointment, as she had realised from the outset that it was a treasure trove of provocative ideas on a par with Kubrick's science-fiction masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Conspiracy hunter Jay Weidner claims to have had his first religious experience while watching 2001, which had persuaded him that cinema was far from the inferior artform he had always supposed. Indeed, he now recognised that it was a medium capable of conveying complex theses and images of extraordinary power and beauty and he knew from that instant that he had to dedicate his life to studying and making films.

Academic Geoffrey Cocks admits that he didn't get The Shining on first viewing, but was sufficiently intrigued to pay a second visit. This time, he noticed that Jack (Jack Nicholson) used an Adler Eagle typewriter and the coincidence of this German make and the copious references to (19)42 meant, to his mind, that Kubrick's subtext was the Shoah. He was further convinced when he discovered that Kubrick has corresponded with Raul Hilberg about his 1961 book The Destruction of the European Jews and had always been frustrated by his inability to realise his long-planned film about the Holocaust (The Aryan Papers), as the subject was too daunting.

By contrast, musician John Fell Ryan is certain that Kubrick had other things on his mind when he made The Shining. Thus, he harks back to the time when he worked in a film archive and learned that much of the action seen in wartime newsreels was shot in safe zones and then cut into authentic battlefield footage. As a master of filling the screen with visual allusions and in-jokes, Kubrick would have been fully aware that he could slip confessional details into the mise-en-scène that would enable him to salve his conscience and alert sharp-eyed viewers to his involvement in one of the most infamous pieces of screen chicanery in history.

Having introduced his experts, Ascher allows them to expand upon their themes in a segment headed `Boiling Down'. Unfortunately, as he opts not to label the unseen speakers, it's not always clear who is making which point. But it seems to be Blakemore who claims that Kubrick was so bored after finishing his adaptation of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon (1975) that he decided to challenge the conventions of mainstream film-making by following the lead set by contemporary advertisers (and chronicled in Wilson Bryan Key's book Subliminal Seduction) by strewing the imagery with sexual references that imply the Overlook Inn is populated by spirits who attract humans in order to feed off them. This rather far-fetched theory is supported by a slow-motion clip from the office encounter between Jack and manager Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson) that makes smuttily phallic use of a paper tray strut close to the latter's groin and raises the worrying concern that the entire documentary may be heading deep into sniggering fanboy country.

Cocks and Kearns do little to counter this impression with discussions of dissolves being used to alter the size of figures and buildings and the impossibility of an interior office in production designer Ken Adam's ground plan having an outside window. But, even though the examination of the layout descends into the realms of minutiae while pointing out the significance of the food store, the Gold Room and the grand staircase, the pair salvage the segment by suggesting that Kubrick deliberately used infeasible geography to parody horror clichés, just as he disappeared a chair behind Jack during a lobby conversation with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duval) and then removed a door sticker of Dopey the Dwarf from the bedroom door of their son Danny (Jake Lloyd) after he passes from a child's to a grown-up's understanding of the hotel's sinister secrets.

Blakemore takes up the commentary again to reveal that Kubrick spent hours on the phone to the manager of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado that had inspired King to write his novel and that he even dispatched a team to spend three months taking photographs and notes and researching the history of the state so he could distil it to make to a universal statement about humanity. There is no question that the past plays a crucial role in the picture and Danny wisely realises that retracing steps can help us avoid repeating mistakes and embark upon a new course. Yet, while the references to TS Eliot and the `nightmare of history' are cogent, it seems to be pushing things too far to aver that because Kubrick had an IQ of 200, he was a superbrain who was striving to re-educate the entire species through dream imagery and logic.

Ascher dubs the next section `Navigating the Labyrinth' and opens it with Kairns linking the fact that Kubrick released Killer's Kiss (1953) through Minotaur Productions with a skiing poster, a picture of a cowboy on a bucking bronco and a bull head-dress to deduce that Jack is a latterday minotaur trapped at the centre of his own labyrinth. This is followed by a lengthy retracing of the routes taken by Danny on his Big Wheel, which culminates in a supposition that by trundling past the family living quarters and the place where Jack betrays Wendy with a stranger he is exploring his parents' head space.

Weidner has his own notions about Room 237, however, which date back to July 1969 when  Kubrick was supposedly hired to fake footage from the surface of the Moon following the landing of Apollo 11. He states that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the front projection process should have noticed the blurs and blotches caused by blemishes in the screen, but the guilt of perpetrating a ruse that he was not even allowed to divulge to his wife Christianne prompted Kubrick to use Jack's indiscretion with the naked woman he discovers in the bathtub (Lia Beldam) to own up to his deception. 

One of the many myths surrounding The Shining is that the owners of the Timberlake Lodge in Mount Hood, Oregon (which doubled as the Overlook) asked Kubrick to switch from King's Room 217 to Room 237 to stop guests from refusing to sleep in a `haunted' suite. But the Timberlake doesn't have a Room 217 and Ryan contends that Kubrick alighted on the chosen number because he shot the lunar scenes on Soundstage 237 and because the distance between the Earth and the Moon is 237,000 miles. Just in case anybody missed the reference, he dressed Danny in an Apollo 11 sweater as he plays with his trucks on the corridor carpet. But not all of his imputations were as playful, as Kubrick changed the colour of the Torrance Volkswagen from red to yellow and then included a shot of a roadside smash involving a red VW (representing King's creation) and a giant truck (denoting his own more potent vehicle).

Under the heading `Elevator to the Graveyard', Cocks espouses his theories about The Shining and the Shoah. He intriguingly connects Jack Nicholson's ad lib from The Three Little Pigs with clips from Disney's Oscar-winning 1933 version, in which the Wolf adopts a Jewish disguise to get inside one of the houses. This, he intimates is both a denunciation of Walt Disney's shameful anti-Semitism and an astute nod to the way in which the phrase `a wolf at the door' lost its Depression association with poverty once various Nazi units adopted lupine insignia during the war.

According to Cocks, Kubrick studied Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment before making the film and incorporated lots of Freudian insights into fairytales like Hansel and Gretel. However, he also borrowed from indigenous fable by revealing that the Overlook was built in 1907 on an Indian burial ground and that, because all nations are founded on blood, the torrent of gore that engulfs the upper corridor comes directly from the wounded heart of conquered peoples, whose suffering is emblematised by the elevator doors that remain closed because subsequent generations have chosen to repress the truth.

Cocks concludes by highlighting the recurring uses of the number 42 throughout the film: on a car number plate; in the fact that there are 42 vehicles parked in front of the hotel in an aerial shot; in the showing of Richard Mulligan's Summer of '42 on the television; and in the fact that 2 x 3 x 7 equals 42. He also refers to the fact that Thomas Mann dwelt on the same numeral in The Magic Mountain, which also centred on an isolated individual witnessing events that relate to the decline of Western civilisation, and it is easy to accept, as we see the opening helicopter swoop over the lake to the accompaniment of Hector Berlioz's Dies Irae, that the film has been consciously constructed to force audiences into confronting the sins of the past and accepting their share in the burden of history.

But, having delivered such a coup de grâce, Ascher pads out proceedings with musings on the significance of Stuart Ullman and Bill Watson (JFK and his CIA handler), the reassurance intended by Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers) when he tells Danny not to be afraid of the awful things he will see because they are merely pictures in a book, and the assertion by online theorist Mstrmnd (who refused to participate in the documentary) that curious things happen if a print of The Shining playing forwards is superimposed on one playing in reverse. More enticing are cogitations on the hexagonal pattern of the landing carpet (and its similarity to Launch Pad 37A at Cape Kennedy) and the fact that the line along which the ball rolls disappears after a cutaway, thus trapping him inside the world of the Grady twins (Lisa and Louise Burns).

The journey ends disappointingly with some smugly valedictory reminiscences by the five speakers and a throwaway admission that postmodernist criticism allows almost any meaning to be ascribed to a piece of art regardless of the creator's intentions. But this should not be allowed to detract from an otherwise engrossing exercise in film dissection that may have its specious moments, but provides plenty of food for thought for avid Kubrickians and conspiracy theorists alike.

What makes this all the more impressive, however, is Ascher's droll use (in imitation of Mark Rappaport's equally acute reverie Rock Hudson's Home Movies, 1992) of extracts from Kubrick's back catalogue, as well as the following features: Edward B. Curtis's In the Land of War Canoes (1914); FW Murnau's Faust (1925); Robert N. Brady's Sitting Bull at the Spirit Lake Massacre (1927); John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939); Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell and Tim Whelan's The Thief of Baghdad (1940); Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945); Roger Corman's The Terror (1953); George Sherman's The Battle of Apache Pass (1953); Nathan Juran's The Brain from Planet Arous (1957); George Cukor's My Fair Lady (1964); Richard Fleischer's Doctor Dolittle (1967); Federico Fellini's Satyricon (1969); Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar (1973); John Hough's The Legend of Hell House (1973); Luigi Matzella's The Heart in Heat (1975); Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men (1976); Peter Hyams's Capricorn One (1977); J. Lee Thompson's The White Buffalo (1977); George Kaczender's Agency (1980); Michael Crichton's Looker (1981); John Landis's An American Werewolf in London (1981); Hans W. Geissendorfer's The Magic Mountain (1982); George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982); Uli Lommel's Brainwaves (1983); Joseph Ruben's Dreamscape (1984);  Lamberto Bava's Demons (1985) and Demons 2 (1986); Mick Garris's The Shining (1987); Ted Lowry's The Eagle Has Landed (1989); Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993); Mike Nichols's Wolf (1994) and Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (2006).

Long before the invention of computer-generated imagery, effects were created by stop-motion cinematography and the master of the art is profiled in Gilles Penso's documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan, a hagiography that also doubles as a charitable appeal in providing a comprehensive survey of the career of the auteur who formed the link between the pioneering fantasies of Georges Méliès and the epic adventures of Willis O'Brien and the CGI spectaculars of the modern era. Produced essentially to raise funds for the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation that now curates his remarkable archive of models, armatures, sketches and test footage clips, this is full of famous faces expressing their debt and gratitude to an unassuming nonagenarian who enjoys the adulation, but takes it all in his stride. Indeed, Penso might have devoted more time to Harryhausen's reminiscences than the well-meaning puffery spouted by such acolytes as James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton and Peter Jackson.

Enamoured of stop-motion from the moment he saw Willis O'Brien's giant ape in King Kong (1933), the teenage Harryhausen began working in his garage on the models and experimental sequences that earned him the lifelong friendship of science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who grew up in the same Los Angeles neighbourhood. On leaving school, Harryhausen sent a show reel for an unrealised project entitled Evolution to Hollywood animator George Pal and landed a job on his famous Puppetoons series. Yet, while the war intervened, Harryhausen was able to refine his craft as part of Frank Capra's propaganda unit and he put these new skills to charming use with the Mother Goose films (1949-53), which he shot on discarded stock and boasted costumes by his mother Martha and armatures by his engineer father Fred, who remained a key collaborator into the 1970s.

Sadly, Penso only shows us a frame or so each from The Story of Little Red Riding Hood, The Story of Hansel and Gretel, The Story of Rapunzel, The Story of King Midas and The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare and it's a shame none are available on disc, as they bear the influence of the Czech maestro Jirí Trnka and are colourful and quirky enough to delight even today's sophisticated kids.

The success of these fairytales led to O'Brien hiring Harryhausen as his assistant on Ernest B. Schoedsack's Mighty Joe Young (1949), another rampaging gorilla story that earned the veteran an Academy Award, even though his apprentice claims to have done 90% of the actual animation of the ape. Admiring director John Landis rightly notes that Harryhausen gave Joe a winning personality and, thus, established a leitmotif that would endear his work to genre fans for the next three decades. Indeed, Spielberg and Cameron are quick to cite pictures like Eugène Lourié's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) as a profound influence on their own sci-fi blockbusters. Adapted from a Bradbury story, this featured a new breed of dinosaur, the Rhedosaurus, and SFX guru Randy Cook explains how Harryhausen lined up his model table with pre-shot footage and matte screens to integrate the Beast into the live action in a more convincing manner than O'Brien had ever managed. Landis and Phil Tippett identify this film as the inspiration for Toho's Godzilla series (although it employed men in monster suits rather than complex animation techniques), while the impact even on a CGI wonder like Jurassic Park (1993) is readily evident in the way the creatures move. 

As the focus turns to Robert Gordon's It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), it becomes clear that Penso is heavily dependent upon trailers to show Harryhausen's creations in action. However, the access to the archive allows him to fill the gaps between the talking-head segments with design sketches, storyboards, models and test shots that complement anecdotes about the San Francisco council trying to stop the studio filming on the Golden Gate Bridge as it was concerned the public would believe the structure could be torn down by a huge octopus that only had six tentacles as Harryhausen couldn't afford to animate the full quota. The `sixtopus' remains a firm favourite of effects specialists Dennis Muren and Steve Johnson and Peter Jackson remarks that such creations fired the imagination of the Movie Brat generation and beyond.

Yet Terry Gilliam is quick to point out that some of the storylines were decidedly ropey and that many of these 1950s Bs would have been long forgotten were it not for the effects. Naturally, the emphasis is on Harryhausen here, but more mention might have been made of the directors he worked under and it is disappointing, especially given the lengthy digression on composer Bernard Herrmann, that more time was not devoted to John Cairney, Martine Beswick and Caroline Munro recalling the difficulties of acting against invisible adversaries with nothing but a cobbled contraption to guide their movements and eyeline level.

The account moves on to Irwin Allen's documentary, The Animal World (1956), for which Harryhausen and O'Brien did the opening dinosaur sequence, and Fred F. Sears's Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956), which required the invention of a geared harness to angle the attack of the craft without making the steadying wires visible. But, while Harryhausen is proud that he demolished the Washington Memorial before Tim Burton did it in Mars Attacks! (1996), this gave him less creative latitude than Nathan Juran's 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), which was switched from being a Cyclops attack on Chicago to a humanoid assault on Rome because Harryhausen fancied a trip abroad. The menacing Venusian Ymir that grows larger each night is one of his most inspired creatures and Joe Dante freely concedes that it influenced his monster in Piranha (1978).

However, Harryhausen was growing tired of destroying cities and persuaded producer Charles H. Schneer to overlook the failure of the Howard Hughes-produced Son of Sinbad (1955) to return to the Arabian Nights for Juran's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1957), which was announced as a Dynamation production to convince adults that this was a full-blown spectacle and not just a kidpic. Filming in colour for the first time, this remains memorable for the Cyclops, which bears a striking similarity to the anti-hero of Peter Jackson's amateur outing, The Valley (1976), while effects designer Ken Ralston admits the influence of the sword-wielding skeleton sequence on the Jabberwocky section of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010).

Seeking to repeat the box-office success, Harryhausen turned to Jonathan Swift for Jack Sher's The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), which was filmed in Super Dynamation and brought Harryhausen to Britain because the Rank laboratory did the mattes so well. If he remained reasonably true to the source here, he departed significantly from Jules Verne for Cy Endfield's Mysterious Island (1961), which featured a crab purchased from Harrods that was humanely killed and then fitted with an internal armature to facilitate its stop-motion onslaught. But most would agree that Harryhausen produced his finest work for Don Chaffey's Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

John Landis extols the virtues of Talos and how much pathos there is in his death scene and Peter Jackson astutely asserts that each creature and character represents an acting performance by Harryhausen himself, just as motion capture is now used for computer-generated visuals. The Hydra was similarly a challenge, as it had so many heads to move independently. But the highlight of the entire picture is the fight between seven skeletons and three Argonauts, which required the input of skilled swordsmen and a series of stuntmen, who rehearsed the moves thoroughly with the actors before they shadow fought for the camera and Harryhausen matted in their opponents during post-production.

As historian Tony Dalton reveals, this episode has been copied several times, most notably in Sam Rami's Army of Darkness (1992), Stephen Sommers's The Mummy (1999) and Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). But Harryhausen is more concerned with his own artistry and ingenuity than sincere flattery and he moves on to discuss his love of HG Wells and how a failed effort to persuade Orson Welles to team on a film of War of the Worlds in 1949 and missing out in the late 1950s on the rights to The Time Machine (ironically to George Pal) led him to make First Men in the Moon (1964). What seems remarkable about this film now is that it was produced just five years before Apollo 11 landed on the lunar surface and, yet, the Selenites hark back to the moon folk devised by Georges Méliès for A Trip to the Moon (1902).

Yet, as CGI artists like Tippett, Muren, Greg Broadmore and Andrew Jones point out, nodding to the past has always been a facet of effects work and Harryhausen reinforces this contention in discussing the influence of natural historian Charles R. Knight on his dinosaurs for One Million Years BC (1966), Don Chaffey's Hammer remake of the Hal Roach-produced One Million BC (1940), and The Valley of Gwangi (1969), which was based on a script that Willis O'Brien had abandoned at the outbreak of the Second World War. This proved a troubled shoot, as the studio closed down and its new owners put little effort into promoting the picture. But Henry Selick, Guillermo del Toro, Nick Park, Vincenzo Natali and John Lasseter join the chorus of admirers who admit they tend to watch Harryhausen movies for his bits and zone out during much of the rest, as the standard was often sub par. However, Harryhausen seems to have been on set for the majority of his projects (with some directors taking exception to his presence) and one is left to wonder how much input he had to the non-effects scenes. 

Tiring of dinosaurs, Harryhausen returned to Arabia for Gordon Hessler's Dynarama saga The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) in Dynarama and Sam Wanamaker's Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), which saw him competing against the Movie Brats he had done so much to inspire. Recalling the Kali sequence in the earlier film, Colin Arthur joins Tippett and Muren in pondering whether stop-motion is more effective than CGI because models look less real (and, therefore, seem more fantastical) than amalgamations of pixels. More amusingly, Harryhausen dismisses James Cameron's prediction that he would enjoy working with cutting-edge technology and says he always preferred working alone (although he latterly allied with Jim Danforth and Steve Archer) in order to retain the control that he feels gets lost where computerisation is concerned.

Having considered each Harryhausen movie in some detail, the documentary rather peters out, as access was clearly limited to footage of Medusa and the Kraken from the Gustave Doré-influenced swan song, Desmond Davis's Clash of the Titans (1981), while the references to his honorary Oscar and BAFTA, the award of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and his 90th birthday celebration are rushed to accommodate an appeal for his Foundation. Spielberg and others chip in with closing acknowledgement that they have stood on a titan's shoulders and there seems no question that modern mainstream cinema would be very different without Ray Harryhausen.

Having covered much of Britain, Michael Portillo heads for Europe in Series 1 of Great Continental Railway Journeys. Clutching the 1913 edition of George Bradshaw's epochal guidebook, Portillo goes in search of the belle époque that would come to end so soon after the first tourists followed Bradshaw's recommendations. As in the two UK series, Portillo makes an amiable, if occasionally stiff travelling companion .But, while he may lack the common touch in chatting with ordinary people at the landmarks he visits, his enthusiasm for railways is evident. Moreover, each programme exudes an affecting wistfulness for a lost age of inspiration, sophistication and delectation (at least for the upper classes) that closed so quickly and calamitously when it clearly had such potential to transform the world for the better.

The first recce sees Portillo leave St Pancras on the Eurostar for Paris. He learns about the 1910 flood, when the River Seine rose to unprecedented levels, before taking a spin in a vintage Le Zébre car, admiring Hector Guimard's exquisite entrance to the Abbess Métro station, meeting some artists in Montmartre and sampling some absinthe. Next morning, he pops into the Gare de Lyon's glorious bistro, Le Train Bleu, before taking the TGV to Marseilles. However, his destination is the overlooked Côte d'Azur town of La Ciotat, where Louis and Auguste Lumière astonished the patrons of the Eden Theatre in 1895 with footage of a steam locomotive pulling into the nearby station. As he sits in the very same seats, Portillo perpetuates the myth that the audience fled in terror thinking they would be crushed before trying his hand at pétanque, the variation on boules that was invented in 1907 by local Jules Lenoir, whose rheumatism meant he had to pitch his hollow metal bowls with both feet on the ground.

Further along the coast, Portillo learns why Queen Victoria and Edward VII were such frequent visitors to Antibes and paints in a spot beloved of Impressionist Claude Monet and Pointilliste Paul Signac. He also discovers how Nice's Promenade des Anglais got its name and spends the night in the opulent Hotel Negresco before having a flutter in the Grand Casino in Monaco and exploring the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, which was designed in the 1870s in imitation of his Parisian masterpiece by Charles Garnier. 

The inimitable French joie de vivre would return in the 1920s. But the previous decade really did turn out to be the fin de siècle for Austria-Hungary and, in his second expedition, Portillo travels through the disparate territories ruled between 1848 and 1916 by the Emperor Franz Josef. He begins in the empire's second city, Budapest, whose unification in 1873 was aided considerably by the construction over the Danube of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, which was saved from destruction by Austrian troops during the 1848 revolution by British engineer William Tierney Clark, who became a Magyar hero as a consequence. Leaving Buda after riding the funicular railway that affords spectacular views of the Hungarian capital, Portillo ventures east into Pest, which was the commercial heart of the city. Here, he tries some deep-fried langós bread, rides continental Europe's oldest underground network and takes the curative thermal waters at the famous Széchenyi Bath.

Suitably refreshed, Portillo entrains the next morning for Bratislava. Now the capital of Slovakia, this was once the place where the kings of Hungary were crowned. However, there is only time for a brief tour around St Martin's Cathedral before a catamaran ride brings us to Vienna. Prior to checking into the Grand Imperial Hotel, Portillo rides in a horse buggy around the Ringstrasse, which was the centrepiece of Franz Josef's bid to beautify his capital along the lines of Napoleon III's Paris. The day ends with an amusing tutorial in dancing the waltz, which was considered shocking when it was first introduced, as the couple had to retain close contact throughout. Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt's `The Kiss' also scandalised polite society by daring to depict passion. But the more enlightened regulars at Café Central in 1908 were more aware of its significance and Portillo is surprised to learn that Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin all rubbed shoulders here with Sigmund Freud.

The next stage of his journey takes Portillo to Salzburg and he visits the museum at Mozart's birthplace before seeing a production of The Magic Flute at the Marionette Theatre, which opened the year Bradshaw published his guide. Portillo gets to enact an encounter between a lion and a giraffe before taking in the mountain scenery around St Gilgen. He joins a couple of performers singing highlights from The Sound of Music on a lake steamer before scaling the Schafberg at St Wolfgang in a cog train locomotive whose tank is positioned at a unique angle to enable it to climb the 1:4 gradient. The view is breathtaking, as it is at Bad Ischl. However, a pall still hangs over the summer retreat of the Hapsburgs, as it was here that Franz Josef signed the declaration of war on Serbia in the summer of 1914 that tipped the entire continent into a pitiless conflict.

The sight of Portillo stood beside the desk with the emperor's great grandson, Markus, is very moving and the spectre of the Great War also informs the third episode, which takes him from Berlin to the Rhineland. The centrepiece of the Prussian capital is the Brandenburg Gate and Portillo discusses its significance in the divided Germany before riding on the first electric tramway, which is still going strong 132 years after it was opened. The same is true of the giant Treptow telescope at the Achenhold Observatory, where Albert Einstein gave his first lecture on the theory of relativity in 1915.

From the station at Charlottenburg, Portillo heads into the Harz Mountains of Saxony-Anhalt, where he climbs the Brocken in a magnificent steam train that passes through scenery that inspired such children's stores as `Hansel and Gretel', `Little Red Riding Hood' and `Sleeping Beauty', as well as the Walpurgis Night scene in Goethe's Faust. An encounter with a cackling witch proves more than a little embarrassing and Portillo seems eminently grateful to escape to the manicured grounds of Schloss Herrenhausen, which was home to George I, who refused to learn English on ascending the throne in 1714 and remains the only British monarch to be buried outside the country.  The nearby city of Hanover was largely destroyed by RAF bombing during the Second World War, but many of its more famous sites were rebuilt, including the Kastens Hotel, where Portillo spends the night.

Next morning, a fast ICD train takes him to Dortmund and on to Essen in the Ruhr Valley, which was once the industrial heartland of the Reich. He visits a mine with Bauhaus features that is now a museum and learns about the contribution made by Krupp steel to Germany's economic and military might. But he concentrates on more celestial matters on arriving in Cologne, whose majestic Gothic cathedral was commissioned by Archbishop Rainald of Dassel in 1164 as a resting place for the relics of the Three Wise Men after they were looted from Milan by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. He also pays a call on the shop established by Italian émigré Johann Maria Farina, whose descendants produce Eau de Cologne from a recipe that has remained a secret since 1709.

Diverting into Wuppertal to rattle along in the Schwebebahn overhead monorail, Portillo returns to the main network to hear about the part that railways played in the revolutions of 1848 and the Schlieffen mobilisation plan that gave Germany such an advantage in the autumn of 1914. As a result of losing the war, however, Koblenz remained in French hands until the 1920s and the surrounding area remained demilitarised for a further decade. This is the Rhine Valley that inspired Richard Wagner and Portillo learns how Romanticism evolved into nationalism during a visit to Kaiser Frederick William IV's summer residence, Stolzenfels Castle. But the odyssey ends on a more pleasurable note, with a glass of Riesling hock in a Moselle Valley vineyard started centuries earlier by Cistercian monks.

The fourth expedition takes Portillo through Switzerland and starts with him arriving from Alsace in Basel, which is unique in the fact that it accommodates French and German trains, as well as local Swiss services. The country was comparatively late in joining the railway boom. But, since 1847, it has developed a network that is admired around the world both for the  prodigious feats of engineering involved and the spectacular beauty of the landscape through which it passes. However, its creation has also thrown up a few surprises, such as the Roman settlement of Vindonissa that was discovered beneath the town of Brugg.

Following a quick visit to the excavation site, Portillo passes through the hot mineral springs at Baden and samples some Spanish brotli, a buttery pastry that was so popular that the line was nicknamed the `Spanischbrödlibahn' because the wealthier residents used to send their servants off on the train to collect their morning treat. The Northern Railway was the first fully Swiss system and Portillo travels to Zurich to learn about its silk and textile mills. He also calls in at the Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon (MFO) factory, where electric trains were built to suit the steep Swiss gradients and proved much cleaner and more efficient than the steam locomotives still being used across the continent. Production ceased in 2000, but the site is now a park and looks surprisingly charming beneath the girders of the old manufacturing hall.

The administration building was moved along the track in its entirety and Portillo leaves us with footage of the remarkable operation as he makes his way around Lake Zurich to spend the night at the Savoy, which became the first hotel in the city in 1838. He also pops into the control tower above the 24-platform station before lunching on a selection of cheeses while heading into the Alps on the Glacier Express, which links St Moritz and Zermatt and is renowned as the slowest express in the world. At Chur, he discovers that downhill skiing only became a pastime 150 years ago and how British tourists played a key role in popularising winter sports.

En route from Göschenen to Fluëlen on the St Gotthard Line, Portillo points out the dynamite factory founded by Alfred Nobel near Lake Lucerne and marvels at the ingenious corkscrew layout of the track that reduces the severity of the incline. He takes a boat across the water and arrives at the city where Wagner lived for six years from 1866. While visiting Tribschen, he hears the Siegfried-Idyll being played on the composer's own piano and feels humbled at being in the home of his musical hero. He also enjoys a detour to Meiringen to stay in the hotel that Sherlock Holmes used before taking the funicular to his fateful meeting with Professor Moriaty at the Reichenbach Falls. The sleuth's body was never found and such was the outrage among readers that while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might have called the book The Final Problem (1893), he was forced to keep devising cases for 221B Baker Street's most celebrated resident for many more years.

The final leg of the journey takes Portillo via Interlaken and Kleine Scheidegg to the Jungfraujoch, which boasts the highest railway station on Earth (at 11,333 feet). He learns how engineers had to bore through the Eiger and the Mönch to build the electric cog railway that runs through tunnels for seven of its nine miles. The views are breathtaking, however, as they are from the Sphinx laboratory at the High Alpine Research Station, which provides crucial data on climatic conditions around the Aletsch Glacier, which is the longest in the Alps.

The trenches of the Great War ran all the way from these mountains to the North Sea coast and Portillo pays his respects to those who fell between 1914-18 at the conclusion of his trip from Amsterdam to Northern France. The vast central station in the second city of the Netherlands was hoisted over the sea on wooden stakes and Portillo inspects one visible on the concourse before exploring the canal network and visiting the Royal Asscher Diamond Company. In 1905, Joseph and Abraham Asscher were charged by Edward VII with handling the biggest gem-quality diamond ever mined. But, while the Cullinan found in South Africa was colossal, it also contained a tiny flaw and, thus, it was cut in two to be fitted in the Imperial State Crown and the Sceptre with the Cross that are still used in British coronations.

The craftsmanship was impeccable, but only 15 members of the firm survived the Holocaust and there is a grim irony in the fact that Portillo's next port of call is the Peace Palace that American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie helped to fund after an 1899 peace conference. However, it was only completed in 1913 and the newly inaugurated Court of Arbitration could do nothing about the conflagration that erupted the following year. Having lunched on herring and raw onion on his way to the Dutch capital, Portillo is content to enjoy the view from the old-fashioned corridor train carrying him to Brussels. The Belgian rail layout was planned by the newly independent state from 1835 and Portillo is surprised that Bradshaw took such a dim view of elegant sites like the Galerie de la Reine, which is where Jean Neuhaus II concocted praline in 1912 and later invented the box of chocolates.

Portillo takes a crash course in the art of the chocolatier at the nearby Musée du Cacao et du Chocolat and offers the results to tourists on the Grand Place before taking his well-earned repose in the Metropole Hotel dating from 1894. Within two decades, troops would be fighting for every last inch of Belgium and Portillo makes for Mons, where the British Expeditionary Force first went into action. He hears how Maurice Dease became the first soldier to win the Victoria Cross during the conflict while defending the Nimy Railway Bridge and how Sidney Godley won the same award alongside him and lived on to 1957.

Travelling via Lille and Albert, Portillo crosses into Flanders, where so much of the landscape was decimated by the Western Front. He finds out about Le Petit Train de la Haute Somme, which ran on narrow gauge prefabricated track and carried troops and munitions to the trenches, and joins some enthusiasts in laying a length of line. In transit to Thiepval, he is told about the carnage on the Somme in 1916 and, standing beside Edward Lutyens's 1932 memorial to the 72,000 Tommies without graves, discovers the tragic fate of 19 year-old Bernard Locker, whose war lasted for just three weeks.

In Amiens, the capital of Picardy, Portillo admires the imposing Gothic cathedral, which remains the largest surviving medieval structure and has the hightest nave in the world. He is told how citizens sandbagged the edifice to protect it during the war and how it was spared during the 1918 German offensive when a counter-attack drove back the Kaiser's divisions and changed the course of the campaign. Like thousands of troopers before him, he also sends a postcard depicting the Weeping Angel that became a symbol of an enduring pain that was finally relieved in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne on 11 November 1918. Portillo recalls how the Armistice was signed in Marshal Ferdinand Foch's mobile headquarters, only for Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel to take the French surrender in precisely the same spot on 22 June 1940. Adolf Hitler had the site demolished and the wagon was taken back to Berlin, where is was torched during the last days of the Second World War. And, as Portillo looks around the restored monument, he hopes that Europe never witnesses such turmoil and bloodshed ever again.

Finally, this week comes March to Victory: Road to Berlin (2007), a 10-part history of the Second World War that is not to be confused with Al Murray's Discovery Channel series, Road to Berlin (2004). Released in the United States with the companion volumes, March to Victory: Road to Rome and March to Victory: Road to Tokyo, this would appear to have the scope and scale of Mark Arnold Foster's The World At War (1973). But, while it is much more comprehensive than Ken Burns's seven-parter, The War (2007) - which sought to present the impact of the conflict on the citizens of Luverne, Minnesota, Mobile, Alabama, Sacramento, California and Waterbury, Connecticut - this lacks the authority of the landmark ITV chronicle. Ray Foushee's stentorian narration misses the finesse of Laurence Olivier's wiser, wearier delivery, while editors KC Hight and Gary Evans cross-cut between newsreel extracts gleaned from Airboss Military Stock Footage and the National Archives in a much punchier manner that owes more to a son et lumière show than a work of serious historiography. 

Writing in collaboration with Chas Main, director and executive producer Edward Feuerherd tells the story steadily and the research is solid enough. However, as one might expect of a programme aimed primarily at American audiences, there is a pronounced US bias and British veterans will scarcely recognise some of the engagements because their parts in them have been so diminished. Yet, the interviews conducted with surviving servicemen are full of keen insights, indelible memories and genuine humility at making it through alive when so many of their buddies perished. The reminiscences are particularly poignant in the discussions of D-Day and the aerial bombardment of Germany. But there is no sense of what the living under occupation must have been like for the vanquished nations and even the Holocaust is viewed through the prism of the advancing forces rather than those who endured it.

The recurrence of stock combat images is distractingly noticeable, while the division of the episodes into bite-size `acts' is as deleterious as the score (by an unnamed composer), which falls well short of Carl Davis's music for The World At War. It may seem unfair to keep making such comparisons, but, as this follows the template so closely, they are inevitable. What is fascinating, though, is how little the US perspective has shifted since Frank Capra produced the seven films in the Why We Fight series (1942-45) to convince die-hard Isolationists that President Roosevelt had entered the war in Europe to protect vital American interests and not just to bail out the Limeys, as they had done in 1917. Thus, this is more useful as an introduction to Stateside attitudes to the war outside the Pacific theatre than it is as a balanced overview of events from the rise of Hitler to the fall of Berlin.