One of the great joys of BBC4 is that its schedulers and programme makers are never afraid to rummage around the dustier corners of the archives. While the terrestrial channels keep on recycling the same old clips and repeats again and again, chances are that the average BBC4 documentary or theme night will come bolstered by such unlikely long-forgotten gems as Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance performing on The Basil Brush Show, or a frankly quite deranged animated blur of colour and percussion sounds aimed at increasing use of your local Post Office.

The recent BBC4 theme nights devoted to the sun and the moon had already been bolstered by a number of superb archive choices based on their respective themes, but the absolute high point was something that might on first glance have been considered throwaway filler. Time Shift: “Sun and Moon” was effectively 30 minutes worth of old sun-and-moon-related clips, but in selecting these took full advantage of the availability of countless thousands of hours worth of fascinating and little-seen footage.

During the course of this mesmerising programme, actual space missions and serious scientific analysis rubbed shoulders with a typically off-beam Tomorrow’s World explanation of how the sun “works”, using a hefty prop set of scales. The Doctor and Rose observing “The End of the World” was counterbalanced by clips from Moonbase 3, the serious-minded sci-fi drama made by the early 1970s Doctor Who production team, which revealed its dramatic Radiophonic Workshop-themed opening titles held a far greater promise of excitement than the programme itself could deliver. The Goodies poked fun at lunar modules, mission control and moonwalks, while the Blue Peter team somehow managed to make a bizarre yet purportedly scientifically realistic “moon creature” sound about as exciting as the usual historical subjects of their documentary features. Patrick Moore chatted to a vicar who refused to believe the sun is hot, Alan Whicker encountered some Europeans standing stock still in the midday sun, and Dougal arrived on the moon to find the other inhabitants of the Magic Garden had casually beaten him to it.

Punctuating all of this were almost subliminal clips from The Clangers, Tellytubbies, The Late Show‘s eight million decibel howling wolf, a young Ronnie Corbett in an ancient – and very funny – black and white sketch, and Dana (whose increasingly absurd appearances in such clip-driven programmes are coming to suggest her old TV shows are in fact some sort of lost surrealist weird-out) performing a rather forceful version of Dancing in the Moonlight.

The real find, however, was an animated version of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, made for the long-running BBC schools’ programme Watch in 1979. No doubt a great many viewers found their subconscious was jerked into recognition on seeing this once frequently-repeated sequence, but presented here in isolation it took on a very different sheen, coming across as somehow spartan and desolate. In fact, the whole programme was characterised by a unique and distinctive feel. The same thematic approach has been adopted by many past efforts, notably BBC2′s seminal Windmill, but Time Shift: “Sun and Moon” featured no presenters or linking material and simply flowed from extract to extract depending on mood – an approach which proved incredibly effective.

With only 30 minutes to fill, it was perhaps inevitable not everything viewers may have half-expected to see would appear. There was no sign, for example, of the Cybermen stomping across the lunar surface, Monty Python’s Flying Circus suddenly transforming into The Buzz Aldrin Show, or The Black and White Minstrel Show commemorating the achievements of the Apollo 11 crew with Dai Francis crooning a plaintive ballad at the controls of a spaceship. Similarly, from a slightly warmer perspective, there was no room for Peter Egan as a shape-shifting solar-powered centuries-old supervillain or, perhaps most surprisingly, the end of Disaster Area’s live set from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Meanwhile, the most glaring omissions were not through choice; the BBC for reasons best known to itself failed to preserve any of the special programming detailing their coverage of the Moon landings, so nothing could be shown of Patrick Moore and James Burke’s studio presentation, or the Omnibus special “What if it’s Just Green Cheese?”, featuring contributions from artists as diverse as Judi Dench, Pink Floyd, Michael Hordern and The Dudley Moore Trio.

Thankfully, there was more than enough rare and unusual footage to compensate for any omissions, glaring or otherwise. This was a fantastic and hugely entertaining idea for a programme, and as convenient schedule-fillers go it’s certainly worth sticking around for after the “main feature”. Let’s hope the experiment is repeated for the next theme night.

Yet the production team have gone one step further with “The Kneale Tapes” actually bringing back the alien that featured so memorably in The Quatermass Experiment. The glove puppet added little in the way of substance but its presence was entirely charming and wholly indicative of the due care and attention that is regularly on display in BBC4′s finest documentary strand.

As with many of Time Shift‘s subjects, Kneale is a partially forgotten and often misremembered figure from an earlier age. Today people tend to think of him as the grandfather of TV sci-fi, and so categorize his work alongside series such as Doctor Who and Day of the Triffids. “The Kneale Tapes” goes some way to redress this common misconception ensuring that Kneale receives appropriate credit as one of the key figures behind the development of television drama as a whole. In particular, his realisation that television should be as able to retell dramatic fictional stories as effectively and complexly as theatre is given due credit here.

In reviewing Kneale’s work there is much to talk about. Time Shift wisely limits itself to a few key interviewees to compliment Kneale’s own reminiscences. Of these Mark Gatiss, Jeremy Dyson and Kim Newman provide informative and often highly personal reactions to each of the featured works. It is evident that all three are keen enthusiasts of Kneale’s writing, but are also well able to contextualise its significance within the development of television drama and science fiction and horror (a term Kneale apparently dislikes intensely) as a whole. In particular Gatiss’ effusive praise for Quatermass and the Pit is highly contagious. Meanwhile Andy Murray (Kneale’s biographer) reliably moves the narrative forward, ensuring that at all times we remain aware of where we are within the chronology of Kneale’s life story.

The man himself makes for a fascinating and surprisingly accommodating interviewee. With a reputation for irascibility, the Kneale we see here is forthright but pleasant and seemingly willing to talk about any and all aspects of his career, including – most interestingly – some of the internal wrangles he experienced when attempting to bring his work to our screens. The sections featuring Kneale with his wife are particularly enjoyable, providing us with a sense of the character behind the reputation. Certainly this reviewer had no expectation of coming away from the documentary with any sense of Kneale as a playful character.

Given the 40 minute running time it is inevitable that “The Kneale Tapes” is unable to offer a fully comprehensive overview of Kneale’s 50 year career, and resultantly his later works for ITV (including Kinvig and Beasts) don’t even get a mention. This is a shame particularly with regard to the former series as the notion of Kneale as a comedy scriptwriter is one that would surprise a number of viewers. However to dwell on what is not featured is to do this hugely entertaining documentary a disservice. What we do have is informative, thorough and imbued with a genuine sense of nostalgia and enthusiasm. Besides, any television programme that causes the BBC to repeat the masterful The Stone Tape should be praised to the rafters.

On one of the cards was a picture of Malcolm Muggeridge and four questions about him. The game was intended for children and it was a testament to the incredible, now largely forgotten, reputation of that great broadcaster and national figure that eight year olds were expected to know not only who he was but several facts about him. That he was a journalist, an intellectual, and a famous man on the telly. It would amaze me if very many people at all could recall those facts now.

It seems almost fitting then that the retrospective on his remarkable career should have been shown on BBC4, a channel ludicrously criticised for not gathering huge ratings. For Muggeridge himself has now become almost a specialist subject, although the excellent documentary Time Shift: Malcolm Muggeridge resurrected some – there could never be enough time for anything like all – of the achievements and controversies that had made him a household name. To illustrate: in the film I’m Alright Jack, starring Peter Sellers, Muggeridge was used to host the fictitious current affairs programme that brought the various protagonists together towards the end. That this meant that no explanation of the nature of the programme, or that it would naturally be of national interest, points to something of his stature.

Time Shift: Malcolm Muggeridge was made to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth and gave a full and rounded insight in to the career, if not altogether the mind, of one of the formerly most vital parts of the intellectual life of television in Britain. Archive footage was chosen extremely well with excerpts of his documentaries on India and the work of correspondents in America used to illustrate the developing career of journalism which he pursued with vigour prior to the outbreak of World War II.

It came into its own though with tremendous footage of the seminal work Muggeridge produced in the post war period: his documentary on Mother Theresa of Calcutta, which created for them both an international reputation; his demolition through force of argument of the likes of Oswald Moseley and the chiding of sacred cow Bertrand Russell; the reappraisal of both history and religion in his travelogues in India and the Holy Land; and most especially the fearsome Face Your Image in which he was confronted with his detractors and forced to respond to their painfully detailed criticisms of his past actions and utterances.

Even a programme of this length – 90 minutes, narrated well by Edward Stourton – would not have been able to capture all of the facets of even his television career in any detail, but since it was obliged, naturally, to deal with every other area of his considerable public and private life this was hardly surprising. But it did manage to capture well the essence of the man and his reputation, from his disillusionment with his formerly ideal state of Soviet Russia through his finding of evangelism and organised religion to his eschewing of television – and just about everything else he had formerly believed in – and reminded the viewer that this was a man who should not to be forgotten.

In later years Muggeridge became the byword for the curmudgeon, an on-screen Kingsley Amis (and it was in these terms that he most likely found his way onto those playing cards), but the programme acknowledged his status as the man who first raised the placard of satire, paved the way for the powerful interview, pioneered the personal and indeed controversial form of documentary as a broadcast of opinion and not just the report of fact. Television and its viewers owe much to Muggeridge. We can only hope that this splendid film makes its way on to more mainstream channels to once again inform them of his former stature.

Importantly this was not a hagiography – the inclusion of Face Your Image was proof enough of that, as was the now infamous film of him criticising John Cleese and Michael Palin over The Life of Brian on Saturday Night Sunday Morning – and contributors provided much information on the criticism as well as support he received from them, and others. Friends such as Richard Ingrams and Christopher Booker of Private Eye were as damning as they were laudatory, bemoaning his descent into that figure of reactionary curmudgeon as much as recognising and celebrating his may achievements. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, another friend, was also on hand to provide that same function as was Muggeridge’s niece. No side of him was left unexplored or commented upon demonstrating that this was a character as complex as he was accomplished.

Ironically it is difficult to conclude that it would very unlikely a man such as Malcolm Muggeridge would achieve the same fame in modern television without sounding as distinctly curmudgeonly as he eventually became. The force of the man was his unbowed intellectualism, untempered by populism. We can almost hear him harrumph over the likes of Simon Schama and David Starkey and their sensational history, for example. Yet this film showed that there was more to him than that, exemplified by his fondness for a saying told to him by an unknown man in Granada studios: “Only the dead fish swims with the stream.”

It is to our own disadvantage that we forget the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge, whatever we think of him. It is to our advantage that BBC4 exists to present subjects such as Muggeridge in their schedules and let us make up our own mind with well crafted, quality programmes such as this.