The critical and box office success of The King’s Speech has resulted in the television industry taking an inevitable interest in the film.

Obvious capitalisation efforts aside, The King’s Speech is one of the more meritorious offerings of the wide selection of documentaries whose premise is based upon popular films.

The documentary, like the film, focuses upon the life of King George VI and the development of his stammer and the eventual treatment by innovative speech therapist Lionel Logue. The film is interspersed with mentions of other patients of Logue and professional speech therapists explaining the complexities of stammers and how they arise.

These were particularly informative and interesting, giving reality to the surreal scenes seen in The King’s Speech. The affectionate but balanced accounts of Logue’s therapy were highly insightful, displayed the intricate relationship he had with his patients and presented the odd methods he employed in pursuing treatment for speech therapy.

Stammering is dealt with very sensitively, and the documentary delicately explains the psychological traumas and conditions associated with stammering, giving a genuine supplementary explanation for many of the events displayed in the film.

The show gave an interesting display of some of hostility that George VI faced due to his stammer, such as from Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang and from his own father, King George V.

More importantly though, it helped to illuminate that which the film already does, present the worry, doubt and pain experienced by George VI by both his stammer and shy-ness and his sudden thrusting into the position of monarch.

Notably, unlike the film, it failed to address the popular effects of the abdication and only touched on George’s popular feeling, most glaringly ignoring the initial popular opposition that George faced upon succeeding to the throne.

The documentary was fairly formulaic and had the standard Channel 4 documentary production style: middle-class, off-screen narrator;  casual foreboding references before advert breaks and cheeky innuendos. Thankfully, it avoided trying to make controversy out of an uncontroversial subject.

The show is hardly essential viewing, it doesn’t present much new if you’ve seen the film or read the book. But people with a general interest in the period of history, or just the abdication crisis should give this a look-in. It was interesting and was pretty entertaining, but lacked the heart of some documentaries and in particular of the film itself.