A sleaze-hunter willingly captured by his game, Nick Broomfield casts himself as the auxiliary subject of his shambling procedurals, and his documentaries often double as admirably transparent chronicles of their own making. While Broomfield’s investigatory technique too often amounts to a frustrating pile-up of unfocused Q&As and misplaced credulity, he always stumbles upon unpredictable detours and colourful margin-dwellers on his gumshoe wanderings, and his droll, faux-naïf persona always smooths us over the bumpy ride.

Broomfield began as a social documentarian in the Frederick Wiseman tradition, examining the effects of new high-rise housing on working-class communities in Liverpool (Who Cares, 1971; and Behind The Rent Strike, 1974) and the attempted rehabilitation of impoverished delinquents in Juvenile Liaison (1975), his first project with frequent collaborator Joan Churchill. Moving to the US, Broomfield’s attentions ranged from a California juvenile detention centre (Tattooed Tears, 1978) to a Georgia basic-training camp (Soldier Girls, 1980) to a Nevada brothel (Chicken Ranch, 1982).

In The Leader, The Driver And The Driver’s Wife (1991), which focused on South African pro-apartheid politician Eugene Terre’Blanche, and Tracking Down Maggie (1994), which chased after Margaret Thatcher, a tendency that to most investigatory documentarians would have seemed a fatal flaw became a quintessentially Broomfieldian device: the utterly futile pursuit of one’s slippery nominal subject. After the amusing but disappointing Biggie And Tupac (2002) – invaluable if only for its astonishing prison interview with fearsome hip-hop exec Suge Knight – he returned to his 1992 subject, Aileen Wuornos, for a second anguished, affecting documentary, Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer (2003). Broomfield then turned from documentaries to a dramatic feature based on a true story, Ghosts (2006), which re-enacted the tragic deaths of a group of Chinese cockle pickers at Morecombe Bay in 2004.

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