Statistics reveal that 75% of older people experience hearing loss, and this looks set to increase to 80% by 2032. A moving new documentary is here to see what can be done to improve things.

In this two-part series, Strictly Come Dancing winner and actor Rose Ayling-Ellis encourages a group of people living at Hughenden Gardens Retirement Village to learn British Sign Language, to see how it might open up their lives and foster community. She also explores the impact hearing loss can have on older people and the lack of provisions available in this bold and emotional experiment.  

Watch now on BBC iPlayer 

If you’re number one on the call sheet, it means you’re the lead actor on a film listed first on the daily schedule. “It means you’re the subject, not the object,” says actor Tessa Thompson. 

This two-part documentary – Black Leading Men In Hollywood and Black Leading Women In Hollywood –  features some of the biggest names in the world talking about their own experiences of navigating the industry, breakthrough moments and what the future might look like for the next generation.  So get ready to be enthralled by Angela Bassett, Viola Davis, Michael B Jordan, Daniel Kaluuya and Denzel Washington. 

Watch on 28 March on Apple TV+

Women are the centre of this new docuseries about a brutal spate of murders in New York. 

For more than a year the remains of women were found along a stretch of Ocean Parkway in Suffolk County, Long Island. Some of the women, who were able to be identified, were sex workers and had been reported missing many years earlier. 

Director Amy Garbus points her lens at a system that meant the deaths of these women were ignored for years until the arrest of suspect Rex Heuermann in 2023, as well as charting the fight their families went through for justice. 

Watch on 31 March on Netflix 

In 2023, 16-year-old Brianna Ghey was brutally murdered by two teenagers. 

Two years on, her mum, Esther, speaks about the unimaginable loss of her daughter, how it has driven her to campaign for the welfare of young people online and offline, and why she is calling for a public inquiry into the rise of peer-on-peer violence. The 75-minute film will also hear from Cheshire police, who worked on the case and caught the killers within 28 hours. 

Watch now on ITVX

Five years ago, our lives changed when Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic and much of the world went into lockdown.  

The UK recorded more than 230,000 Covid-related deaths, and this documentary traces the pandemic through the eyes of 12 people who lost loved ones – including the film’s director, Catey Sexton whose mother died. It includes the stories of people who are still waiting for answers, those who are trying to move on and those who never will. 

Watch now on BBC iPlayer

From the trailer alone, I can tell this will be one of those documentaries where you spend the whole time gasping in shock. 

The 90-minute film centres on Graham Hornigold, a TV pastry chef and co-founder of Longboys Doughnuts, who received an email from Dionne, who told him that he was the son she’d had taken away from her, and she wanted to meet him before she died. Dionne was a multi-millionaire who spoke 18 languages and wanted her son to inherit her businesses, but it soon turned out that everything wasn’t how it seemed, leading to immense heartbreak and financial ruin. 

Watch now on Netflix 

In 2011 it was revealed that more than 60 women had been duped into long-term sexual relationships with undercover policemen who were spying on them. Many of these women were teenagers when they first met these spies and went on to have children with them before they were ghosted or abandoned.

A new three-part ITV series, made by the creators of Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, follows five of the victims. They are speaking for the first time about their experiences of being gaslighted and betrayed, and the system that enabled it. 

Watch now on ITVX

Stacey Dooley is back with a series of three documentaries. 

In Rape On Trial, she gets unprecedented access to women who have waived their right to anonymity after reporting being raped by someone they know. 

Meet The Shoplifters sees her on the shopfloor of some stores affected by the shoplifting epidemic in the UK as well as meeting people who steal regularly, for different reasons. 

And, finally, in Growing Up Gypsy, she spends time with three young women who are part of the travelling community, one of the most marginalised groups in the UK. 

Watch now on BBC iPlayer      

Journalist Alex Crawford helms this powerful new documentary about the Yazidi community in northern Iraq, who have faced extreme violence at the hands of Islamic State. 

In 2014 many of the people in the community were slaughtered with women and children taken as slaves and raped by Islamic State members. That brutality continues with the documentary discovering that many women are still held captive today. 

As well as on the ground footage, Crawford speaks to Farida Khalaf, an author who has become a human rights activist since her village was attacked, and Kovan, who was just 14 when she was abducted. 

Watch on 2 May on Sky News 

Five years on from the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, this film will look at the moment of global reckoning it caused, including encouraging the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK. It will also examine where we are now, looking at both the progress made and what still needs to be done. 

The documentary will hear from members of George Floyd’s family, Chief Medaria Arradondo, the Minneapolis police chief who testified against one of his own officers, and Samuel Kasumu, Boris Johnson’s closest advisor on race, as well as cultural figures including Andi and Miquita Oliver, Nathalie Emmanuel and Munya Chawawa.   

Watch on 9 May in cinemas and later that month on BBC iPlayer

Booklover Sarah Jessica Parker is an executive producer on this documentary that received a standing ovation when it recently premiered at Sundance.

It’s about librarians in Florida and Texas who are fighting back against the proposed ban of 850 books, mostly about race and gender. They suffer verbal harassment and threats of physical harm for their efforts yet refuse to remove the books and attempt to turn hatred on its head.

Date tbc, in cinemas

The David Beckham documentary famously taught us that his wife, Victoria, used to be driven to school in a Rolls Royce. For that alone, we’re looking forward to what we discover about Mrs Beckham in this behind-the-scenes look at her world. 

The series promises to delve into Victoria’s reinvention from a popstar to creative director of a global fashion and beauty brand that she’s trying to steer to new heights, alongside all the dramas of being a wife and mother in the public eye. 

Date tbc, Netflix 

With the recent news that Grenfell Tower will be destroyed eight years after the horrifying fire that killed 72 people and left hundreds homeless, this timely documentary promises to give “a voice to survivors, bereaved families and firefighters” as it charts the warnings ignored and mistakes made by those in power in the lead-up to the 2017 fire. 

Date tbc, Netflix 

But it all came tumbling down when Baroness Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, confirmed in 2023 that they were involved in PPE Medpro, which had then been awarded two contracts worth £200 million, and that they’d lied to the media about it. 

This two-part series will look at the rise and fall of Mone and hear from friends, former colleagues, advisors, journalists and lawyers involved in her story.

Date tbc, BBC Two 

In this the year of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth there’s lots of great content to get excited about. From BBC dramas Miss Austen and the upcoming The Other Bennet Sister to this new documentary charting the writer’s legacy. 

Actors, academics and writers such as Helen Fielding and Candice Carty-Williams all reflect on her masterpieces, including Emma, Pride And Prejudice and Sense And Sensibility, and how she defeated the odds to become one of our most important writers. 

Date tbc, BBC

“The happiest people on social media usually have the darkest skeletons in their closet.”

This is one of the chilling lines in the new docuseries about the death of Gabby Petito in 2021. Petito was a vlogger who was documenting her travels across the US in a camper van with her fiance, Brian Laundrie. But when she stopped posting updates, and Brian returned home without her, her disappearance quickly went viral.

Petito’s body was found at a campsite in Wyoming, where she had been strangled and where Brian later died by suicide. He’d left a note claiming responsibility for her death.

This three-part series hears from her family and also uses previously unseen body-cam footage to explore the final few days of her life.

Watch now on Netflix

Georgia Harrison, the former Love Island star, was a victim of revenge porn when her former partner Stephen Bear shared a private film of them having sex without her consent. He was eventually sentenced to 21 months in prison. Harrison waived her right to anonymity and has been open about the distress it caused, most notably in Revenge Porn: Georgia vs Bear.

Now, with that non-consensual video still available on many websites, she is fronting a two-part series that looks at the terrifying rise in deepfakes and image-based sexual abuse. And her motivation is simple: “Overall, the purpose of doing both documentaries is to do two things; give the power back to the victims and look into how the porn industry works and how it makes its money.”

Watch now on ITVX and ITV2 

In 1966 the modelling world was turned on its head by a 16-year-old called Lesley Hornby, who went on to be known as Twiggy. Her unconventional style and gamine figure were a counterpoint to the Hollywood glamour that came before her, and she became the symbol of the swinging 60s.

Sadie Frost directs this feature about Twiggy’s rise to fame, and it includes commentary from Twiggy herself as well as Erin O’Connor, Paul McCartney and Brooke Shields.

Out now in cinemas