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

Over their lifelong friendship Dickens sometimes mocked Forster and quarrelled furiously with him, but he was the only man to whom he confided his most private experiences and feelings, and he never ceased to trust him and rely on him. It was not a perfectly equal friendship, and Dickens sometimes took Forster for granted, and went through periods of coolness towards him, turning to another friend for a time; but when he was in real need of help it was always Forster to whom he went.

It’s not every evening one is invited to take A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson, and the 90 minutes spent in the company of England’s greatest wit and original lexicographer pass in a whirl of aphorisms and expostulations, with a fair smattering of historical grandees thrown in for good measure. That this production is a two-hander is no impediment to appearances from Joshua Reynolds, Flora MacDonald, the Prince Regent and Oliver Goldsmith (“He goes on without knowing how he is to get off”), not forgetting Johnson’s beloved cat Hodge.

The career of acclaimed tenor Ian Bostridge (b 1964) has taken a somewhat unusual trajectory. He was reading for a PhD on witchcraft at Corpus Christi College, Oxford before he decided to turn his hobby of singing into his profession, despite not having any formal musical training – he has admitted that he probably picked up several bad habits singing along to records of German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Bobby Bland had waited through three difficult years, recording for three different labels with no hits and not much to show for it. He had waited through more than two boring years in the Army with no more than an honorable discharge and a bus ticket to Houston. And he had waited still another two years, practising, performing - persevering more than anything - before finally recording a hit record. But now, it seemed, they were coming fast and furious. Bobby had prevailed and his dream had finally come true. He was at last a star.

There’s a lovely moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Peter Quince assigns roles to his company of rude mechanicals. Unsatisfied with the part of the hero, Bottom interrupts, insisting he be allowed to play not only Pyramus but heroine Thisbe too, as well of course as the murderous lion. It’s hard not to see just a little of Bottom’s eagerness in Simon Callow’s Being Shakespeare – a one-man show penned by Jonathan Bate that casts Callow as Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Lear, Falstaff and Puck.

Albert Speer was Hitler’s most high-ranking war minister, but just how much was he complicit in Nazi atrocities? Thirty years after his death, and 16 after Gitta Sereny’s controversial biography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, Speer remains a most enigmatic figure. Made in 2005 and now released on DVD, Speer and Hitler: The Devil’s Architect (dir: Heinrich Breloer; English subtitles) is an award-winning three-part docudrama that attempts to unravel that enigma.

“Where once was certainty is now only void.” The age of John Donne was also the age of Galileo, Milton, of Hobbes, Francis Bacon and, of course, the King James Bible, whose 400th anniversary we celebrate this year. At the intersection of politics, religion and scientific philosophy, Donne’s life under James I holds up a mirror to the conflicted age that produced this extraordinary work of scholarship. Meshing the poet’s biography, his work and social history, Jonathan Holmes has produced a play whose scholarship and subject matter may be serious, but whose theatricality is poignantly, evocatively and, at times, even erotically handled.

“Too fat, too miserable, too pinched” for love and life, the Brontë sisters famously made a kingdom out of their dingy rectory home in rural Yorkshire. Denied not just a room but an existence of their own, these three Victorian spinsters found authority and expression in novels the world would have them unfit to read, let alone write. It’s an attractive legend, one that leans over the shoulders of Jane Eyre, of Cathy, Heathcliff and Helen Graham, reflecting their virgin-born passions back with all the greater intensity.

It takes a certain something to make a roomful of white people get their funk on. I feel I have dispensation to make that ridiculous generalisation because Lenny Henry, famously born in Dudley to immigrant Jamaican parents, addresses the whiteness of the room the minute he comes on stage at Bromley’s Churchill Theatre, and by the end of this biographical show - part comedy, part music - the entire audience is on their feet, strutting their stuff to “Sex Machine” and “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”.