'Paul Merton's Birth of Hollywood' Review: because cinema deserves a history lesson

Paul Merton's Birth of Hollywood (BBC2, Friday 27th May 2011)

Starring: Paul Merton

Genre: Factual, arts, culture and the media

Paul Merton travels to America to explore and chart the birth of the most dominant cinematic power: Hollywood. He sets out to discover how the early movie technology, the people flooding to American shores and field after field of orange groves evolved into the star-studded community and billion-dollar industry of today. If you love going to our modern cinemas, why not immerse yourself in the history of how they came to be? Paul Merton's is a documentary complete with clips of the racist masterpiece that helped to re-establish the Klu Klux Klan and cheeky snippets of our beloved Charlie Chaplin.

For those with a taste for movies, many may have already studied the history of the moving image. Many of us, it remains to be said, will have not - Merton to the rescue. Cinema is an incredible art form that has advanced at colossal speed in the space of just one hundred years. It has developed from the haphazard silent wonders of The Great Train Robbery (1903) to the dazzling 3D spectacle of James Cameron's Avatar (2009). From the somewhat restrictive Kinetiscope, the first technology that enabled a person to look into its box and see a short film, cinema has become one of the most beloved and accessible arts of the modern age.

In this documentary, Paul Merton has selected the best of early cinema to explore and explain the transformation of a small Southern American hamlet into the iconic location of Hollywood. Intrigued by how a prolific orange-growing community could become the place-to-be for aspiring film-workers, Merton looks at the people responsible for its modern status. His often-cheeky approach to the old greats (let's face it, those jerky old films might have been impressive in their day but a man wrestling a dead bird is only ever going to be funny) celebrates the men and women behind and in front of the early cameras.

Thanks to the devastation of the First World War, the Europeans (the leaders in the development of early cinema) were prevented from going any further with their cinematic ambitions in the first part of the twentieth century. This made room for the Americans to lay the foundations for future of film. As it turned out, many of the most prominent figures were immigrants having left Europe to escape persecution and poverty. Paul Merton looks into their lives and careers and reveals to us how the roles of the director, cameraman, actor and producer began to take shape. This is a great documentary with access to an array of early footage that is as much a delight to watch now as I'm sure it was then. The bonus is, we don't have to sit through the initial three hours of ham-acting and brick fights to get to the best bits - Merton's done it for us.

Catch the next episode of 'Paul Merton's Birth of Hollywood' next Friday at 9:30pm.