Riveting documentary about a remarkable man: Harry Birrell Presents Films of Love and War reviewed

First shown on BBC Scotland, Harry Birrell Presents Films of Love and War (BBC4, Wednesday) was the documentary equivalent of a William Boyd novel, showing us a 20th-century life shaped by 20th-century history. The programme was made by Harry’s granddaughter Carina, who’d been eight when he died, and known him only as ‘a lovable, frail, blind old man’. But then she came across 400 carefully labelled reels of film in the family shed, together with an equally well-organised collection of diaries.

Exactly — or even vaguely — when this discovery took place was one of many details that Carina tantalisingly failed to disclose. (Now and again, we did see her dusting off old cannisters with a look of surprise, but this felt distinctly like re-enactment.) Nonetheless, the result was a wonderfully intimate and affecting piece of television — and one that certainly did her old grandad proud.

Born in Paisley in 1918, Harry never saw his father, who was killed in the last month of the first world war, leaving his mother to bring up two children on a widow’s pension. Harry’s social background and education were among the other tantalisingly withheld details, but someone somewhere was evidently rich enough to give him a cine camera for his tenth birthday. And from then on, he appears to have one sutured to his hand for the rest of his life.

In the circumstances, some of his most resonant footage came from 1938 when Harry was training to be a surveyor in London. As we watched the city partying away, we also heard an extract from a 1940 diary in which he looked back on the excitement of that time. ‘This was London in the good old days,’ he said.