True stories: Stanley Kubrick's Boxes
More4, 10pm
River City
BBC1, 8pm

The insight True Stories offered into Stanley Kubrick's mind by way of boxes, more boxes and then some more boxes of, well, stuff, was utterly compelling. I thought I was a hoarder, and believe me, there are a fair amount of boxes in my attic. But this? This was incredible. Kubrick's films rank among my favourites, in particular The Shining and Full Metal Jacket, but I knew little about the elaborate and at times completely bonkers process of his pre-production.

The film-maker Jon Ronson was invited by Kubrick's long-term assistant Tony Frewin to look through storage boxes the director had accumulated at his St Albans estate. It took Ronson five years to sift through some weird and wonderful items in crates that hadn't been opened for decades, and had never been seen by anyone other than Kubrick's close friends and family.

The first thing Ronson came across was thousands of photographs of Islington, north London. It was amazing to hear that these images - bedside tables, doorways, shops, cafes, hotels, toy shops, mortuaries and so much more - were just some of 30,000 pictures taken by Kubrick's nephew, Manuel Harlan, in one year when he was on location research for the 1999 movie Eyes Wide Shut. It's not surprising many considered Kubrick a little bit odd when you hear stories such as the one revealed here by Harlan, who had to take photos of every section of Commercial Road in London and then stick them together to recreate the street at the director's home. Especially when we learn the eventual "hooker's doorway" shot, which the research was for, was shot on a set in Pinewood. But this eccentricity and attention to detail I found wonderful.

Fan letters were marked F-P for positive, F-N for negative, or "crank", before being filed by location. Many memos were sent - concerned, for instance, with finding out the barometric pressure on a certain day at a certain time. And hearing that he kept no less than three melons in the house at any one time really did make me laugh out loud.

Kubrick measured his newspaper adverts when he thought they fell short of millimetres he had paid for. He was happy once the loss had been explained to him as something that happened in the metal-plating process. On getting no joy in finding bell-collars for his cats that would prevent them catching birds but would break open and not strangle them if they got caught, he simply invented his own. He also had his own storage boxes commissioned and his memo to the company was superb: "Let the lid be not too tight, not too lose, but JUST PERFECT".

It's no wonder he took time to make a film, and years to find the right script, as he was clearly a perfectionist in every sense and created some of the best movies of our time as a result.

Now imagine, if you will, Stanley Kubrick directing River City. Sacrilege to even suggest it, but someone has to bring some life back to one of my favourite soaps. It's all got a bit boring of late, and do we really need another local protection racket? I love how Lenny Murdoch, once an evil gangster, is now simply a lovable rogue.

Last night I was distracted by Gina's clothes. The actress who plays her, Libby McArthur, has recently lost three and a half stone, so you'd think the wardrobe department would provide her with some new clothes that a) fit her and b) flatter her new figure, rather than drown her as they did last night in a hideously ill-fitting black jacket. It's all in the attention to detail. As Kubrick knew.