Thirties in colour - A World Away
BBC Four, 9pm

Does the title refer to the distance of the places in 1930s amateur film-maker Rosie Newman's footage from her London home? Or to the life she led, in comparison to the one going on around her in the decade that ended in the outbreak of the Second World War?

What a jolly life Rosie led. Lucky for the archives, and her friends at the time, she was a bit of a dab hand with a camera and captured most of her adventures on film. It's just a bit of shame that she chose to ignore much of the real news of the decade she so beautifully filmed.

The modern equivalent might be to give someone like Tara Palmer-Tomkinson a video camera, get her to pull some strings with all her aristocratic and royal connections, get access to somewhere like, say, Tibet, or Burma, and come back with footage of parties and picnics and the natives.

This fascinating programme showed us what life was like in the thirties for the privileged few in a decade that included political unrest and global economic depression. Not that you would have known it from Rosie's films.

The access she had, thanks to friends in high places, was quite astonishing. Golf with the Aga Khan on her arrival in India in 1934, and dinner on board the steamship that got her there with the Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh, one of the most excessive men of his time, with the riches to match, were just some of the events in her privileged life that she captured.

What she missed in India was a political rally on Bombay's Chowpatty Beach in 1934 at a time when Mahatma Gandhi was leading the rising nationalist movement, and time was running out for the British Raj. The clip of her panning across the beach straight past the rally is astonishing, yet less so perhaps when we learn she was a guest of the Viceroy of India, Lord Willingdon, who had embarked on a campaign of subduing the movement. The New Delhi horse show she witnessed with the Willingdons was, as she put it, "magnificence beyond description".

Much the same occurred in Egypt as Rosie headed there in March 1938, when it was most definitely the "in" place for the rich to visit. Despite filming a warship in the Bay of Naples, she was clearly largely oblivious to the rise of fascism in Europe and filmed instead more race meetings and some amazing images of the pyramids and Sphinx without, of course, today's obligatory tourists. Harder to watch was the footage of "little black boys we called the water babies" who followed her boat in tiny canoes down the Nile.

In Scotland, in 1937, it also seemed that life was jolly and wonderful, as Rosie's trip north of the border was like that of much of the aristocracy, then and now: a time to play. Her footage of divers at the outdoor swimming pool at North Berwick was, however, fantastic.

The fact she also filmed the Queen and Princess Margaret as little girls in their back garden when they were her neighbours showed she did indeed live in another world from most of us.

If you're bombed out in the Blitz but can stay at the Dorchester, would you complain? The voiceover and talking heads made persistent reference to her ignorance of what was going on in the world as she travelled around it, almost as if the BBC were embarrassed by her.

However, the onset of war seemed to bring out the real film-maker in Rosie, who used her connections to get access to film HMS Berkley, and she stayed in London shooting the chaos the German bombing campaign created. She captured amazing footage, like that of furniture from bombed-out houses piled high in Hyde Park, as she at last used her camera to document true social history, rather than just record the elite at play.