Shepperton Babylon (BBC 4)

The clue lies in the title, hinting at a British version of Hollywood Babylon, the scurrilous and sordid account of Tinseltown's best-kept secrets and worst excesses.

Sure enough, Matthew Sweet's expose was dirtier than a tramp's underpants and saucier than Kinga's message in a bottle on Big Brother.

We learned of an actress who liked to take Eton schoolboys to her hotel suite - and it wasn't to help them with their maths homework.

The advice given to young starlets on how to become a star was "to work under a director and work your way up", which was code for you-know-what.

And there was the actress asked to hitch up her skirt at an audition. This was particularly odd as the part was in a Dickens adaptation. "Do you recall a striptease scene in The Old Curiosity Shop?," asked the narrator.

Of course not, but this is the type of behaviour we expect of people in the movie industry.

Lots of wonderfully dated film clips were shown to alert us to what 1930s British films were like. As silent movies found their voice and became talkies, actors fell by the wayside if they had the wrong sort of voice.

London cabbie's daughter Lillian Wall-Davis was one of the brightest screen stars by the end of the 1920s. Alas, when she opened her mouth, her career opportunities closed. Six years later, she committed suicide, drawing a razor across her throat and turning on the gas just to make sure.

Alfred Hitchcock found a neat way of keeping alive the career of a European actress with an accent unsuitable for the talkies. He filmed her mouthing the words while, off-screen, a woman spoke the dialogue in a terribly British accent.

What film stars did away from the cameras became increasingly reported as the public hunger for stories about their private lives increased. Heart-throb Ivor Novello gave interviews in bed to female hacks, but made sure to keep his pyjamas on. Women reporters were quite safe anyway as he shared a flat with his mother and his boyfriends. Henry Kendall, another top actor, was described as "queer as a coot but popular with ladies of the period". If only his female fans had known where his true feelings lay.

Film sets sounded like vice dens. George Formby's wife Beryl (described as "a paranoid clog dancer") stood guard over her husband because she thought his co-stars wanted to get their hands on his ukulele.

It's a wonder any films got made as they spent so much time having sex, drinking themselves under the table, and taking drugs.

On screen, producers found that exposing people's personal lives was profitable. The Private Life Of Henry VIII treated British history as a sex comedy.

Sensing a hit formula, producer Alexander Korda followed it with The Private Life Of Don Juan. Sex was even used to sell a film about the life of seabirds - The Private Life Of Gannets.