Television is all about borrowing. One clever new format – a mock doc, a makeover show, a clever-clever quiz – spawns a stack of near-identical clones. Most of them do their time until the format starts to tire, eventually to die a natural death. The only exception is the indestructible talent show. Say what you like about Simon Cowell, but in taking reality ever deeper into the realm of fabrication, he killed off the docusoap. There’s barely been a nosey workplace series stuffed with twats mugging for the camera since. But for some reason the docusoap seems to have risen again.

The fall of super-cyclist Lance Armstrong is a subject fit for Euripides or Shakespeare. It has also worked pretty well for director Alex Holmes, who managed to round up virtually all the key players caught in Armstrong's vortex of deceit for this unflaggingly gripping documentary [****].

Two years ago Penny Woolcock was at the heart of Birmingham street gangs in her documentary One Mile Way; that one was titled after the fact that two of the city’s competing outfits were separated only by the distance of the film’s title. In Going to the Dogs, she's back in the same 'hood, this time investigating the city’s dog-fighting scene, with the help of one of the earlier film’s lead protagonists, Dylan Duffus, who proved here a very able narrator-presenter.

Once upon a time British Airways was our national carrier. It had a theme tune that made you want to go "aah"/croon along/flood your lugholes with liquid strychnine. You knew where you were with BA. Then along came the uppity Euro-oiks from Ryanair and EasyJet, companies that can’t locate a space bar on a keyboard let alone a landing strip anywhere near a city centre, and yet they filched all BA's cattle-class customers. Meanwhile various nouveau airlines from Asia kreemed off the posherati who turn left on planes.

The Big Society. Not to be confused with other Bigs: the Big Bang, Chill, Sleep, Easy, Lebowski, Fat Greek Wedding, Trouble in Little China etc. History records that David Cameron’s sizeable brainwave vaporised on impact with reality around the time of the last election. Its only visible remnant is the office of Police and Crime Commissioner. This is the new post that anyone – even former deputy PM John Prescott - can stand for without previous knowledge of policing. Voter turnout in 2012 was on the low side.

When he's not investigating terrorism and the security services, Peter Taylor can usually be found probing into the tar-dripping innards of the tobacco industry. He's made a string of documentaries about it since the 1970s, as well as writing the book Smoke Ring: The Politics of Tobacco.

 “Somebody had to be Bikini Kill, otherwise we would have culturally starved to death.” The quote typifies the deferential The Punk Singer, a bio-doc on the driven Kathleen Hanna, the feminist front-person of the American bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and, most recently, The Julie Ruin.

Almost 45 years after the publication of The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer - now 75 years old and working on a rainforest conservation project in her native Australia, but still “full of bile” - thinks that it is time for a new analysis; a go-to feminist text as succinct and divisive as the one that she created in 1970.

When absorbing any artistic experience we can be confounded by our own expectations. Such was the case for me with Bonanza. Rather confusingly, Berlin are a Belgian outfit majoring in cinematic, multimedia theatre so, perhaps, I was expecting an element of performance to the evening, of direct human delivery. This was not to be, although the presence of a shadowy figure stage-side, sitting at a laptop behind a rustic wooden sign saying “Bonanza Fire House”, kept me wondering if something of this nature was about to occur.

We see the harshness of everyday life in Danis Tanović’s An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker first in its snowy, subsistence landscapes, as hero Nazif goes out to the forest to bring in whatever wood he can find to keep the family home warm. But by the end of the film, which took the Jury Grand Prix at last year’s Berlinale, we have seen, much more chillingly, the harshness of human behaviour.