Denis Lawson was the perfect silky-voiced , slightly quirky narrator for The Genius of Photography (BBC Four), which began with Meudon, a 1928 photograph by André Kertész of a street in a French town. It features a man carrying something in the foreground and a train chuff-chuffing over a viaduct. This wasn’t a classic image but within it lay everything that made a photograph intriguing: it captures a moment in time and embraces mystery – where is the man going?

Every photograph has, as one contributor put it, “a story beyond the frame”. A photograph possesses both detail we can pore over and relationships and histories we’ll never know, “the secret strangeness beneath the world of appearances”, as Lawson intoned. For more than 170 years photographs have “delighted, served, outraged, moved, disappointed and intrigued us”, and Geniusis a cogent and engaging compendium of that history.

For years – and still today to some extent, depending on your view – photography as an artform has been considered inferior to painting. Perhaps this is because, at the outset, the evolution of photography was not artistic, but intimately linked to the development of travel and speed. It had its early pioneers, but photography was democratic and inclusive: the first Kodak cameras, marketed at a dollar a time by George Eastman, were intended as consumer durables.

This first episode filleted the early history of photography – the experiments with camera obscura and the shockingly lifelike and realistic effects of daguerreotypes. Silver chloride, metal plates . . . early photography was a shadowy meeting of art and science. Indeed, the early work of photographers is fascinating, as much for the incidental detail in the pictures as what their focus is. In a picture of the construction of Nelson’s Column by William Henry Fox Talbot, the eye strays to the blurred flyposting on hoardings, and then alongside it a sign forbidding the same ( plus ça change).

Early portrait photography was a heady experience: a sitter would arrive, probably wheezing, in a lofty garret (best for harnessing uninterrupted light) and be met with the smells of ether, alcohol, cyanide and oil of lavender (one supposed these were tools of the trade but the programme didn’t explain what for exactly). A French photographer, Nadar, was unique in that he didn’t overly flatter or formalise his sitters. They have a contemporary naturalness and informality about them.

Genius also showed how painters such as Degas were influenced by photography: figures in landscape paintings began to be cut off, or partially included, in the painter’s frame; in capturing a dancer scratching her back, one curator claimed that Degas was clearly inspired by the photographs of Parisian boulevards.

Tim Kirby, the series producer and director, oversaw a luxuriant, wonderfully researched programme, which even attached a far-from-batty bit of sociological reasoning to how the culture of smiling for a photograph evolved: as cameras became mass produced, so the idea took root that a picture should capture a special event. “Mistakes” – the photographer’s shadow creeping into the shot – became sweetly apparent.

A division grew between vernacular, or popular, photography and artistic photography. Innovators such as Jacques Henri Lartigue captured jumping or moving figures. The advent of war meant that photography grew serious and practically minded, and future episodes will apparently show how it found itself on the “ideological frontline” of political and social change, presumably with the rise of documentary photography. The first episode closed with a photo of a decayed body – the mouth of the skull wide open as if screaming – in a First World War trench.

The images that resonate when considering the BBC journalist Alan Johnston’s abduction in Gaza earlier this year are of his dignified, clear-spoken and composed parents appealing for his release. In Kidnapped: The Alan Johnston Story (BBC One), a Panorama special, he, and they, relived his nightmare. As a journalist, we shouldn’t be surprised that Johnston has a fine eye for detail. But his recollection of specifics – the tiny room he was held in, the perching crow on the window ledge whose freedom he envied, his oscillating dread – was utterly compelling.

Out of the box

ITN is about to make its mobile news and entertainment content available free to users of iPods and other portable video players. The idea is to make news available to us “on the move”. How much the service will allow for proper analysis of the day’s events, beyond the soundbite, remains to be seen. Two soap weddings, two imminent disasters, on two consecutive nights next week. In Coronation Street on Wednesday, David Platt drives his car into the canal (cars and canals are very popular with that family) on his sister Sarah’s wedding day, while in East-Enders, the producers are keeping shtum on what hellaciousness will assail Bradley and Stacey on Thursday. Please e-mail with your thoughts on the nuptials, and, in particular, what you would like to see happen to David Platt.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of 2009
• The 100 Worst Movies of 2009
• The 100 Best Films of the Decade