In 2005, the award-winning documentary maker Morgan Matthews got back in touch with his father, Geoffrey, after an estrangement that had lasted a year. He did this for the right reasons: his dad, whom he loved, was a complicated and difficult man, and he knew that it would be up to him to make the first move.
But when he travelled to rural Warwickshire to visit him, he brought along his camera, too: it would, Morgan told himself, act as a kind of go-between, a means of making it easier to talk. Did he know that he would end up filming his father for the next 10 years? My hunch is that he did. A documentary as magnificent as This Was My Dad: The Rise & Fall of Geoffrey Matthews (BBC4, 10 July, 10pm) has nothing to do with happenstance.
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