TV Review: Life In A Day (BBC2)

LIFE in a Day reveals how, every day, 6.7 billion people view the world through their own unique lens. The film documents a single day on earth through a multitude of perspectives, both ordinary and extraordinary.

Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald, in association with YouTube, creates a 90-minute homage of life on earth today from 80,000 submissions adding up to 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries. The thing they all have in common is the footage was shot on July 24, 2010.

It adds up to a powerful and simple examination of how other people live their lives. But is there a plot? Is it a story with a beginning, a middle and an end?

Of course not. The answer is to just sit back and let it wash over you. Absorb something different, and see what happens.

Bringing it to the screen was no easy task, but the wheels were greased by some of the big names attached to its production.

Macdonald explains that the project was initially conceived as a way to commemorate the fifth anniversary of YouTube, and that he wanted to “take the humble YouTube video... and elevate it into art”.

Also behind the project is Ridley and Tony Scott’s production company Scott Free.

“The inspiration for me was a British group from the Thirties called the Mass Observation movement,” says Macdonald.

“They asked hundreds of people all over Britain to write diaries recording the details of their lives on one day a month and answer a few simple questions.

“These diaries were then organised into books and articles with the intention of giving voice to people who weren’t part of the ‘elite’ and to show the intricacy and strangeness of the seemingly mundane.”

Contributors – from destitute Indian families living in an open boat to geezerish Londoners having a beer with their dad – sent in short snippets featuring what they were doing that day.

Some are touching, like the young woman being proposed to, or the young mother painfully dealing with scars from cancer surgery, while others are just funny – witness the Italian he-man defeated by exercise machines to the glee of his wife.

A number of shots – a young skydiver hurtling through the clouds, a diver slicing into the water – are visually impressive while others – Big Brother-style confessionals – are more personal and revealing.

OWNING a swanky property in the countryside is something to which many aspire, but few can afford.

Sarah Beeny and her husband and business partner Graham Swift lived the dream when they bought 97-room neoclassic country house Rise Hall, in East Yorkshire. But as Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare shows, the dream has become a nightmare.

There are some viewers who will be pleased to see Beeny coming unstuck.

After all, this is a woman who has made her name telling people the best way to make money out of property. But Beeny and her husband are desperate to save Rise Hall for the nation, so you can bet they will come through in the end – she isn’t the sort of person to let something like staggering costs and spiralling problems with the council get her down. Or is she?

QUITE how Simon Russell Beale is going to cram the history of the classical symphony into a onehour slot in Symphony is anyone’s guess, but he’s certainly going give it a good go.

The actor – most recently seen as the Home Secretary in Spooks – looks at the lives and works of three of the most renowned composers of all time, and goes into detail about various theories and tales behind their fascinating masterpieces.

First up is an exploration of Austrianborn Haydn’s work, influenced by time he spent in England. Beale will also be looking at how the remarkable talent of Mozart caused a sensation in the 18th Century, and discussing the greatness of Beethoven’s Eroica. It is, after all, still regarded as one of the greatest symphonies ever created almost 200 years after it was written.