The BEST episodes directed by Julian Birkett
#1 - Close Up: Dennis Potter Under the Skin
BBC Documentaries - Season 1998 - Episode 4
Documentary details the life and career of writer Dennis Potter.
#2 - Victoria: A Royal Love Story
BBC Documentaries - Season 2010 - Episode 243
Fiona Bruce traces the story of one of history's great royal love affairs: the love between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. It was a love based on a powerful physical attraction, and it grew into a marriage that set the tone for the Victorian age. Over the 20 years they spent together, until Albert's tragic death, they gave each other a dazzling collection of paintings, sculptures and jewellery. That collection was on show - much of it for the first time - at a major exhibition in London, and it reveals a new and passionate side of the royal couple. Fiona meets HRH Prince Charles and travels to the royal palaces that Victoria and Albert made their own, as well as the royal workshops where artworks for the exhibition are being restored, to tell the story behind a collection that is one of the wonders of the nation.
#3 - J. R. R. Tolkien
BBC Documentaries - Season 1998 - Episode 12
This tells the story of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, English writer, poet, philologist and author of many stories, including most famously The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It describes the importance of the rural English West Midlands, where Tolkien grew up, in shaping his literary imagination and how the ancient northern languages he studied and taught throughout his life influenced his writing. These factors stimulated him to provide a context in which his own, invented languages might be spoken: an imaginary land called Middle-earth. Accounts of the origins of The Hobbit and of The Lord of the Rings, and the phenomenal success that Tolkien somewhat reluctantly enjoyed when taken up by the counter-culture of the 1960s are included.