It's interesting to consider at what point in someone's career does he or she become a national treasure - as Alan Bennett once so scathingly remarked, “If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel prize” - but there can surely be no debate about whether Dame Judi Dench deserves her status.

Geoffrey Palmer said of his co-star for several years on the BBC sitcom As Time Goes By, “She's everything that everyone says about her” - and what they had to say about her in Charlie Stuart's The Many Faces of Dame Judi Dench was overwhelmingly nice; she's a joy to work with, a stellar presence on screen and stage, and a jolly presence in the rehearsal room.

The film was an enjoyable, if undemanding run-through of Dame Judi's career and, although billed as a documentary, there was little by way of personal biography. For the record, she was born into a Quaker family in York in 1934 and made her professional debut in 1957 with the Old Vic Company and hasn't stopped working since. Palmer was among a long list of talking heads who included Michael Parkinson, Ronald Pickup and Simon Callow, and a smattering of critics, but she was noticeably absent from the programme, and the clips perforce were mostly of her television work and some recent films.

Much was made of her wide range of credits as one might expect from an actress with an extensive and varied CV. Palmer, an old friend who made some drily mocking contributions, explained, “She just likes working, so if someone offers her a job, she takes it. She’s crazy."

She has always, we learnt, moved with ease between stage, television and film, and - unusually for an acclaimed serious actor of her generation – has done as much popular entertainment as she has highbrow work, in a career dripping with awards, including an Oscar. Her longevity means that each generation discovers her for themselves; for many, she's the definitive Lady Macbeth (in Trevor Nunn's 1976 RSC production), or Sally Bowles (in the first London production of Cabaret in 1968), or Queen Victoria (in John Madden's film Mrs Brown, pictured right).

To a huge number of TV viewers she will be known as the kindhearted Miss Matty in Cranford (pictured below), and to filmgoers for a heartbreaking study of the novelist Iris Murdoch descending into the hell of dementia in Iris (2001), or as the positively evil Barbara Covett tormenting fellow teacher Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal (2006). For me her definitive role was Titania played as Gloriana in Peter Hall's magnificent production of A Midsummer's Night's Dream in 2010. It was, simply, awesome.

Despite being made in DBE in 1988, Dame Judi's fame was confined to these shores until a trio of roles in films released in three years – M in Goldeneye (1995), Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown (1997) and Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love (1998) – gave her worldwide stardom. As her Goldeneye co-star Samantha Bond remarked, Dame Judi become an overnight success in her sixties in the United States and some American journalists, unfamiliar with her extensive CV, innocently asked what she had been doing before M. Dame Judi had been offered Broadway roles when she was younger, but decided to stay put in Britain to look after her beloved husband, the late Michael Williams (her co-star in the BBC sitcom A Fine Romance) and their daughter Finty Williams, herself now an actress.

Much of Dame Judi's popularity, I suspect, comes from the fact that lots of TV viewers know her as a notorious corpser from her appearances on bloopers shows down the years - “We did have the odd retake...” attested Palmer - while director Sally Potter talked about the “weeping levels of hilarity” during the making of her film Rage (2009), when a young man had to be drafted in to tutor the dame in the art of smoking a spliff.

Others may quibble with Dame Judi's recently elected status in a trade newspaper as the greatest stage actress of all time – surely an impossible thing to judge, and one that I suspect she herself would bat off as silly – but as this programme showed, she is head and shoulders above her peers in the breadth of her roles. She's done everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim, sitcom to Z-Cars and Bond to Brecht. And even at an age where others might be retiring she is still taking on demanding and boundary-pushing work, such as her role in the experimental film Rage.

This was decent trot through an interesting and full career, and it was fun to see some footage of Dame Judi as a young actress. But ultimately her absence meant that the film lacked any meaningful analysis of her work.

• Judi Dench: All the World's Her Stage reviewed on theartsdesk

DAME JUDI DENCH ON THEARTSDESK

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Rose Theatre (2010). Judi Dench is a glorious Gloriana in Peter Hall's flat production

Jane Eyre (2011). Dench plays kindly housekeeper to Mr Rochester in invigorating version of the novel with Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska

Skyfall (2012). Dench's M (pictured) is written out of the franchise in possibly the best ever Bond movie

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012). The Dames have it in John Madden's tale of British travellers abroad

J. Edgar (2012). Dench as Hoover's mother lacks commitment to her American accent in flawed Eastwood biopic

Philomena (2013). Judi Dench touches the heart once again in the Dame's latest bid for Oscar glory

Peter and Alice, Noël Coward Theatre (2013). Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw step through the looking glass in Michael Grandage's elegiac production of John Logan's new play

Spectre (2015). Dench's M cameos in a video message beyond the grave as Daniel Craig and Sam Mendes carry on without her

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015). The expats are back in that rare sequel that betters its predecessor

The Winter's Tale, Garrick Theatre (2015). Judi Dench brings gravitas to Kenneth Branagh's West End season opener

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses - Richard III (2016). Dench is a matchless veteran opposite Benedict Cumberbatch chills's crook-backed king

Overleaf: watch Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth in Trevor Nunn's 1976 RSC production of Macbeth

Without wanting to sound humbuggy, do we really need another Great Expectations? Let alone two. There’s yet another movie coming next year but breasting the tape first is a new three-parter from the BBC. Cinema last visited the story of Pip Pirrip in 1998 when Alfonso Cuarón transplanted the novel to present-day New York. On television Tony Marchant had a go a year later. Theatre was there even more recently with Declan Donnellan's staging for the RSC in 2005 and Watford Palace's Asian version earlier this year.

I didn’t really know that much about Sarah Palin. I remember being kind of blown away when she got up on that stage with all those kids and gave that rather brilliant speech which seemed to be an enormous breath of a fresh air for the Republican Party. This film was done before the Tucson shootings. I don’t think she’s revealed just how horrible she could really be. To that extent I think I had a fairly open mind. I was aware of her contempt for education and established politicians but I had enough curiosity to give her the benefit of the doubt.

What makes something funny? Why do comics stand on stage in front of strangers and try to make them laugh? Is any subject beyond a joke? What is the purpose of Alan Yentob? Those questions – OK, only the first three – were raised by Imagine's presenter in this, the first of a two-parter about the art of stand-up.

Whether it's via the Disc of the Day column or our eclectic mix of overnight live reviews, on theartsdesk we try to traverse as much of the world of New Music as we possibly can. As Christmas swings around we consider it our duty to help guide readers through the thicket of music DVDs. They can be a tricky proposition: with live concert films it's notoriously hard to retain the sense of occasion while also somehow rising above it, while documentaries are often either exercises in fan-only arcana or ego-fuelled attempts to build a personality cult.

He would not hesitate to wake up employees at all hours to yak about ideas. He could fire an underling in the seconds it took for the elevator to ferry him to or from his fourth-floor office. He shouted, like, a lot, even at Bill Gates. Especially at Bill Gates. And yet the great and the good last night all queued to waft smoke up the posthumous iHole: Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the internet, Norman Foster, who invented the glass airport, Stephen Bayley, who invented designer waffle.

The decontamination squad scraped the remains of 38-year-old ex-City professional Joyce Vincent from her seat, in front of a TV which had flickered unseen for three years. They took her wrapped Christmas presents too, and left unsolvable mysteries. How did she die? And how does someone become so alone that they’re left in a north-London flat above a busy shopping centre till their body melts into it?

“Will the app clicker replace the page turner?” asked Alan Yentob’s state-of-play rumination on the book. It’s a cutely phrased question and, as everyone reading this will be familiar with the digital world – this is theartsdesk, after all – a fair one. Will zeroes and ones make the book redundant, a sort of totem, or will it adapt, taking on the new forms presented by the digital world? The programme didn’t answer the questions, but at least it did show the possibilities.

This was the television equivalent of the slaves in ancient Rome, who used to run alongside their imperial masters whispering in their ear, "Remember, you are mortal." Long before the tantrums, bombast and megalomania of The X Factor, there was New Faces, ITV's Birmingham-based talent show. Its theme tune was Carl Wayne's "You're a Star!" Alf Lawrie's film revisited the 1986 finalists of New Faces to find out how the last 25 years had treated them, and it proved to be an unassuming gem of observational film-making.

Recorded music has a lot to answer for. Until its arrival, most people made their own music – at home, using whatever resources were to hand. If you were lucky, you might have owned a piano. The less well-off might have had access to a ukulele. Tony Coleman and Margaret Meagher’s enchanting, lo-fi documentary stakes a bold claim for the ukulele’s pivotal role in 20th-century music history.