documentary

When documentary filmmaker Sean McAllister started his latest project, A Syrian Love Story, he had little idea of the journey he would end up on.

What began as a film following a family as they waited for their mother to be released from prison evolved to demonstrate how one family could be affected by the turmoil in Syria.

The story began in 2010, when McAllister met Amer, a Palestinian living in Syria, who was looking after his three sons alone while his wife, Raghda, was incarcerated for writing a book criticising the Assad regime.

Sky 1 has won the rights to air the new Muppets' television show, The Muppets. 

The programme will be the Muppets' first television network series since Muppets Tonight, which was broadcast between 1996 and 1998.

One documentary, Is Britain racist?, explores whether prejudice against ethnic minorities remains. It will air in September.

Undercover journalists take to the streets of Britain to expose the reality of discrimination against skin colour.

Presenter Mona Chalabi will be putting British people on the spot to discover how racism affects their way of life including who they decide to marry.

A trailblazing four-part documentary series on the history of women will air on BBC Two this autumn.

Charting the role of women in society over 10,000 years, The Ascent Of Woman is the first ever documentary to explore the history of women from the birth of civilisation to the contemporary era.

Focusing on the themes of freedom, oppression, inclusion and exclusion, the series aims to study the status of women and women’s rights.

The series is written and presented by Dr Amanda Foreman, the author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

The BBC will be paying tribute to the Queen as the longest-reigning monarch in British history in a new documentary.

The Queen’s Longest Reign: Elizabeth & Victoria will air on 9 September to mark the milestone.

Queen Elizabeth II has surpassed her great-great grandmother Queen Victoria who reigned for 63 years and seven months.  

If you’ve ever fantasised about throwing away your phone and disappearing without leaving a digital footprint, look away now.

Channel 4’s new series Hunted is set to explore what it’s like to stay concealed in a society where being monitored is a daily reality and questions whether we ever truly can run away from 24/7 surveillance.

Part-documentary and part-thriller, this brand new format sees 14 ordinary participants on the run to evade capture from expert Hunters. Can they escape detection, avoid CCTV and even social media?

Channel 4 has commissioned a controversial new documentary that promises to lift the lid on the the secretive world of Muslim drag queens in the UK. 

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”.

Twofour Broadcast, the production company behind hit fixed-rig series such as Educating Yorkshire has been hard at work with new TV documentary,The Kings & Queens of Speech. Drawing to a close on Sky1, the series followed six schools preparing for a national debating competition.