Imagine: Annie Leibovitz – Life Through a Lens (BBC One)

A vocation is a job that chooses you. The photographer Annie Leibovitz had hers chosen as she moved between air force bases as a child. “It was easy,” she told her sister Barbara in a superb documentary bought in for the Imagine . . . slot, “to see the world as a photographer because you saw it through the frame of a car window.” She has been framing the world ever since, producing fine reportage from the cultural battlefields of the Seventies and the literal warzone of Sarajevo in the Nineties. Mostly, however, she works with celebrities, whom she persuades to do the most extraordinary things.

In Annie Leibovitz – Life Through a Lens we saw her place Kirsten Dunst in a ball gown that was wider than Dunst was tall (seeing her reverse, you expected an alarm to bleep), Keira Knightley in a hurricane and George Clooney upon the raft of the Medusa (“Lose the jacket; it’s not working.”) What puzzles about Leibovitz is how she manages to achieve intimacy with her subjects – Demi Moore nude and distended, John Lennon naked and vulnerable in bed beside a fully clothed Yoko Ono – while being a fearsome and prickly woman herself. I once interviewed her in her studios in New York and I felt the chill among her staff as soon as I went in. Fearful of her mood that day, they cancelled the Times photographer, who happened to be a distinguished Magnum member and a friend of Leibovitz. I was privileged to hear a rare Leibovitz grovel.

The intimacy Barbara achieved with her subject was no doubt helped by being her sister. But she was aided too, I suspect, by where Leibovitz was in her life: a mother, mourning the death of her lover Susan Sontag. (She had Sarah when she was 51 and her twins were carried by a surrogate mother; Sontag died in 2004.) For years Leibovitz was vague on her exact relationship with Sontag and interviewers (myself included) were too scared to pin her down. Interviewed for her 2006 collection A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005, which we saw her prepare in the film, she finally called herself and Sontag “lovers”. Reviewing the photographs of Sontag’s dead body, she wept.

The film was not scared to concede that her talent comes at a price that exceeds her invoices. We saw Leibovitz haggle with her daughter over how much time the Clooney shoot would take. Her first editor,Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, recalled how irresponsible she became towards the end of her stint there, “leaving rental cars everywhere”. A spell in rehab, organised by her parents “sorted her out”. Even critically, it was not all hagiography. The photography critic Vicki Goldberg said her most famous Vanity Fair spreads were not picture stories but one-liners. She doubted that photographs could “capture” a person’s essence. That was fine by Annie: she didn’t think they could either.

What Happened Next? (BBC Four)

The three boys at Upholland seminary in Lancashire who starred in an Everyman documentary back in 1984 thought they had a vocation, too. They may have had, but as What Happened Next? revealed, it wasn’t the priesthood. The pubescent Michael Wilde, for instance, who worryingly talked of the gap where his sexuality might have been being filled by “a total desire for God”, grew up to marry happily and have two sons. He works as an operating theatre nurse and noted how the scrubbing up and passing of surgical instruments was a form of ritual. Eammon Callaghan was a married teacher, his Catholic school’s “spiritual co-ordinator”. Edmund Devlin, so unhappy at school that he became anorexic, was now a recovering alcoholic with a girlfriend and a film script in development. He crossed himself before his daily run.

Sadly, no statistics were provided for how many priests Upholland (which closed in 1987 and is being turned into luxury flats) did churn out and this follow-up was really not much better than the original film looked.

Summer Heights High (BBC Three)

It made you realise that 20 years ago observational documentary was in its infancy. Now, it is so familiar as a form that everyone wants to parody it. On Summer Heights High, the Australian comic Chris Lilley strove hard to do an Office job on an Adelaide school. The script had its moments but Lilley needed to cast someone other than himself in the plum parts. It was like seeing Ricky Gervais play Brent, Gareth and Dawn. Virtuosity is good, Chris. Funny is even better.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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