TV / DVD

Axelbank worked at Goldwyn Pictures in New York. In 1917 he spotted a newspaper headline: Revolution in Russia! "I wish I could take motion picture there," he said. "We don't have any of our own from 1775."

The American revolutionary Max Eastman helped him make the film. An early supporter of the Bolsheviks, Eastman had travelled to Russia in the 1920s. He had close political relations with many of the leaders of the Soviet regime and especially with Leon Trotsky.

Today Ken Loach is an internationally feted filmmaker. But he was also once a prophet in his own country. Working with a generation of radicals, he excelled at what became known as the drama-documentary - a TV genre that was socially engaged, aesthetically experimental and politically influential. It made working class people the subject of public service broadcasting. This essential collection has many of the key works which now deserve the widest rescreening for their enduring relevance and artistic courage.

In 1964 Granada TV took the Jesuit maxim "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man" as inspiration for a series which documented the lives of 14 seven year olds every seven years. Now they are 56.

When it was first broadcast, Seven Up! shocked many with its emphasis on class - but that is what made it such compelling viewing. For me, this first programme remains the most powerful - at the time, I had been teaching seven year olds in an east London primary school.

In his will the deceased has left the flat to his "former flatmates". Like my own brother he was dead for two weeks before he was found, so the flat needs some cleaning up. We see a group photo which shows the seven main characters as they were when they first moved in.

Jack wants to run a sort of island of egalitarianism where people do not have exclusive relationships - but he imposes his own rules, such as no one being allowed to sleep with anyone else for more than three nights.

Not long ago video games were seen as being exclusively the refuge of children and of men unable to escape their childhoods. Perhaps little has changed, but the huge profits recorded by the industry over the last decade have proved, if nothing else, that for many video games have become a medium of choice. Moreover, games like Braid and Penumbra have proven that, even when commercial, games can still present challenges that test not only players' reflexes, but the nature of the medium itself and even the society that has produced it.

Watch The Borgias and you will be entertained by a gripping, sumptuous drama telling the story of Rodrigo Borgia, a man who schemed, bribed and poisoned his way to become Pope Alexander VI. This nine-part series follows the rise of the despotic Borgia family as they struggle to maintain their grip on power.

Actor Jeremy Irons is so convincing as Rodrigo that he makes God's envoy on earth appear "human" despite the inhumane methods he uses. Murder, intrigue, treachery and sex make this so much more than a stilted costume drama - although the costumes are stunning.

There are three comedians that I think embody the stand-up scene today: Frankie Boyle, talented but toxic; Michael McIntyre, pleasantly babbling like Boris Johnson's bozo blood brother; and Stewart Lee who is, apparently, the current comedian's comedian.

Stewart Lee's stand-up divides opinion. Not fluffy or feel-good (unless you enjoy his riffs), he does upset people. Fortunately he upsets the right people.

Two key works of Soviet cinema are newly available with the DVD release of Zvenigora and Arsenal. They are the fruit of silent cinema's final maturity before an imminent eclipse ushered in by the talkies and (with graver finality) Stalinism.

"Light 'em all up," comes the voice on the radio as we see footage from an Apache gunship over Baghdad in 2007. A group of men are then mown down by machine gun fire. "Nice," continues the voice, impressed at the carnage. This footage was never before shown on TV.

This is the war we don't see - the daily violence of the "war on terror". Instead we are served a diet of false stories about weapons of mass destruction and imminent terrorist attacks, repeated on loop 24 hours a day and awarded an unquestioning reverence.

The 100-page accompanying booklet makes grandiose claims for the significance of these films but the reality is quite different: this box set is not worth buying and only a handful of these films are worth watching even once.

In fact this set is only worth reviewing because it throws an interesting sidelight on the relationship between socialist politics and film, culture and art.

You can see the issue played out clearly enough in the recently released feature Made in Dagenham.