On the box

TV review

STANLEY KUBRICK'S BOXES

More4 Monday, 5pm

TIGER SPY IN THE JUNGLE

BBC HD Monday, 9pm

THE THIRTIES IN COLOUR

BBC 4 Wednesday, 9pm

IN AN age where celebrity is seen as a goal unto itself there's something laudable about the late Stanley Kubrick's refusal to play the fame game. Eschewing the red-carpet escapades of modern celebrity he retreated into the private fiefdom of his Hertfordshire estate. And, as the gaps between his films became longer, the rumours about his antics grew ever stranger. Some claimed he was filming a story about a child's journey to manhood and beyond, tracking his star's growth in real time by shooting for only a few days each year. Another apocryphal tale had him begging the BBC to let him direct episodes of EastEnders, whilst internet conspiracy loons, blaming his reclusive lifestyle on a guilty conscience, accused him of helping Nasa to fake the moon landings.

Jon Ronson's latest documentary, Stanley Kubrick's Boxes, revealed a simpler but no less fascinating explanation for the director's missing years. Having always planned his projects meticulously, Kubrick's fondness for collecting and collating research materials had simply got out of hand. Driven to perfectionist extremes, he'd filled hundreds of painstakingly catalogued boxes with the reference materials and ephemera he needed to fulfil his cinematic visions; an all-consuming process which left him with relatively little time in which to actually make films.

What's more, just as the rest of us own decade-old novels we've yet to read and Ikea CD shelves which will forever remain unassembled, Kubrick had films he just hadn't got round to making. One such project, a Holocaust epic based on Louis Begley's novel Wartime Lies, entered a painful and protracted gestation. Locations were photographed and research materials gathered. Christiane, the widow Kubrick, spoke movingly of the psychic torment the process seemed to cause him. In the end, however, his slow pace was the project's undoing. With Spielberg completing Schindler's List during Kubrick's lengthy preparations, Wartime Lies was suddenly rendered irrelevant.

Still, though Kubrick moved at the millimetre-a-century speed of tectonic plates, the notion that he might have been a little too fixated with minutiae was given short shrift. Unearthing a home video originally recorded for an awards ceremony, Ronson allowed the absent maestro the final word on his perfectionist ethos: "Although it can be like trying to write War And Peace in a bumper car, when you finally get it right there are not many joys in life which can equal the feeling."

Offering a stark contrast to Kubrick's finicky genius, The Thirties In Colour showcased the work of a less exacting auteur – pre-war socialite Rosie Newman. Rich enough to afford early colour film at a time when even owning a camera was akin to sporting a platinum tiara, Miss Newman seems to have been the sort of free-spirited Proto-Sloane Bertie Wooster might have accidentally proposed to. Alas, though Rosie's footage of the Empire's heyday retains its warm Kodachrome glow, the poor dear was oblivious to the more distressing sights her camera recorded. Filming in the Raj's more squalid corners she managed to mistake brothels for rustic peasant dwellings and pan past nationalist protests without noticing the turmoil brewing. Thankfully her return to Blighty yielded more interesting footage. With her protective bubble shattered by Luftwaffe munitions, she gamely took to the streets, or rather what was left of them, capturing evocative images of the Blitz.

Film-makers of a far more unorthodox bent figured in Tiger Spy In The Jungle, a gloriously beautiful natural history series with an equally gobsmacking modus operandi. Reasoning that homo-sapiens just can't get close enough to film tigers in the wild, the Beeb's natural history boffins have instead sent some elephants to do a mancub's job. And, wielding suitably adapted cameras which they lug about with their trunks, these gifted pachyderms have captured some truly astounding footage.

Of course, after decades of reliably stunning BBC wildlife films we've become somewhat blasé about the genre. So much so that Tiger Spy's initial airing on BBC1 passed almost unnoticed. But now that it's been relocated to the Beeb's HD service, a reassessment is warranted.

In dreary old pauper-vision this was just another roll of natural history wallpaper, but seen in high-definition it inspires a religious sense of awe. Viewed through the pin-sharp optics of the "Ele-cam", the tigers seem startlingly vivid, almost unreal in fact. That "fearful symmetry" William Blake kept banging on about has never seemed so apparent. Even David Attenborough, providing the mandatory voice-over, sounded overwhelmed by this pixel-perfect spectacle. Gadget-obsessed early birds have never had better cause to feel smug about their 50-inch plasmas and throbbing sub-woofers.

Of course, not being au fait with such things, I can't say how much creative control the elephants had over the finished product. But I can easily see these noble beasties carving out a lucrative career in telly. I suspect they'll soon be renting office space in Soho, snorting white lines with their prehensile appendages and pitching Vernon Kaye vehicles to E4.

Elsewhere on the infernal gogglebox, Sasha: Beauty Queen At 11 (BBC3, Monday, 9pm) offered another argument for handing control of the TV industry to a more enlightened species. Exploring the unspeakably disturbing world of child beauty pageants, this soul-crushing documentary profiled a pre-teen moppet from Burnley who her parents seem to have mistaken for some kind of show dog.

Sasha's mum Jayne, a former "Glammer Mod-ehl", definitely seemed to be projecting her thwarted ambitions on to her daughter. But the production team, having already established a mocking contrast between Sasha's gaudily made-up face and the family home's unpainted walls, manipulated matters further by sending her across the pond for a humiliating but oh-so-entertaining try-out in a Texan beauty pageant. Though she's hardly mother of the year, Jayne wasn't the only one exploiting this unfortunate waif.