An unusual view from high society

TV review

The Thirties In Colour, BBC4

Margo MacDonald – My Right To Die, BBC1

IT'S THE 1930s, but not as we think we know them. Amateur film maker Rosie Newman didn't just record her travels with an early polychromatic colour camera, she used a rose-tinted lens to film the sunny side of that troubled decade.

The Thirties In Colour is the latest instalment of the BBC's oddly compulsive trawl through the archives of the Edwardian, First World War and Twenties periods. There's something fascinating about all these unstructured images of people self-consciously posing for this new technology, especially in the best of these series so far, The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon, which showcased the amazing "local films for local people" made by a small Lancashire photography studio.

This new series is a little different: as colour cine-film was so expensive, few could use it and they tended to keep it for notably special occasions, which means the pictures available are less everyday but no less revealing. As the next-door-neighbour of the future queen, Newman was not only able to afford it, but also had access to the highest society, which made her home movies more glamorous than most.

Well-presented, with careful use of expert historians to explain the context of the footage, this programme showed her films which reveal an entirely different world to the usual idea of the 1930s – unemployment, pending war and social unrest.

When Newman went to India, in the last few years of the British Raj, she aimed her camera in almost all the wrong directions: a red-light area with prostitutes waiting for custom is mislabelled as "a quaint street", she managed to stand at the viewing point for Kangchenjunga and not get it in shot, while a pleasant beach scene somehow didn't include the massive demonstration happening nearby.

But what she did film was the Empire at its confident, ostentatious height, assured that their control of the country would last forever. Her visit was spent with princes and the Viceroy; she even went on a tiger hunt with the exiled king of Greece. Footage of the clean modern lines of New Delhi, the newly built colonial capital, and of the lavish procession organised by the Maharaja of Jaipur at his spectacular palace stood out particularly.

Later Newman filmed Scotland (where she had a run-in with a "rather dour" traffic policeman in Edinburgh, which would never happen now, of course) and her royal neighbours. But with the outbreak of war, the fantasy world she filmed was gone, and her focus turned to military and propaganda purposes.

It's always useful to be reminded that the easy way we sum up history probably didn't feel like that at the time – for Newman's high society, the 1930s were still a time of luxury and assurance. And how, I wonder, will future history programmes describe our own times? Will they, perhaps, look at Margo MacDonald's campaign as having changed Scotland's laws on euthenasia and assisted suicide?

Obviously we'd all be worse off if Margo – no, I don't know her, but somehow you can't help but call her that – were to die, but she believes that if her Parkinson's disease becomes unbearable, she should have the right to end her life.

It's almost impossible to be neutral about the subject, and this was a polemic: though she did speak to some who disagreed, she was most impressed by a visit to Amsterdam where the process is legal. But the programme was far too short to fully do justice to the issues involved and needed more time for her to explain them fully.