They're capable of recording your every move. Will Coldwell gets a high-def heads-up.

I thought of Tolstoy watching Kids in the Middle, Brian Hill's grim and engrossing account of the wreckage of a marriage, and specifically of those famous lines about how all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. It's one of the questions that hovers behind pretty much every documentary about a social issue: is this film representative of a common experience? Or is it representative only of what you see in front of you? To be able to answer "yes" to the first question is to armour your film against all kinds of accusations, or at least to offer a rationale for some invasions of privacy. But very often it's the second kind of film that really stays with you. By the end of Kids in the Middle, I'm not sure you'd learned a great deal about the kind of contact centres that were its notional subject. But you'd been given a painfully vivid picture of how a bad marriage can rot a family and hurt children.

I don't know what the demographic overlap is between Independent readers and the BBC3 audience, but if you haven't been watching you might be interested to learn that the Corporation's most frivolous channel has also built an impressive record for bringing serious social issues to a younger audience. It has produced reality formats that illuminate the true cost of the cheap goods we enjoy, it's used pop presenters to explore foreign affairs and it's done thoughtful documentaries about disability issues in which disabled people serve as reporters, not just the passive subject matter. This week alone you could have watched a drama documentary about an inner-city murder on Monday, Reggie Yates exploring the world of teen gangs on Tuesday and, last night, Pips Taylor's I Never Said Yes, a documentary about the worrying gap between reported rapes and convictions. And unfortunately the last of these was an example of how good intentions aren't all you need.

Condemned prisoners face death with aplomb and a milkshake in Herzog's candid documentary

The Yorkshire-born minimalist architect John Pawson has designed the clean lines of commercial buildings, airport lounges and even monasteries all around the world.

I've been working on Comic Relief and Sport Relief for 27 years now and still feel the same passion for it as I did at the start, when I wandered around Ethiopia in the middle of the famine in 1985 wondering whether I could think of anything I could do to help. I still feel the same daily shock at how easy it can be to change other people's lives – and the same daily horror at how mere geography lets us live contentedly in a world where people starve to death. And the same daily delight at how wonderfully generous people can be with their money and their time and their talents to help.

I've been working on Comic Relief and Sport Relief for 27 years now and still feel the same passion for it as I did at the start, when I wandered around Ethiopia in the middle of the famine in 1985 wondering whether I could think of anything I could do to help.

Experts believe they are close to confirming that a lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece has been found in the cavity of a medieval Italian building, following the detection of paint similar to that used in the Mona Lisa.

Experts believe they are close to confirming that a lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece is hidden in the cavity of a medieval Italian building.

An 18-year-old was today jailed for a total of seven years for attacking a Malaysian student during the London riots and other offences.

Two thugs who posed as Good Samaritans in one of the most notorious crimes of the London riots were facing jail tonight after being convicted of robbing a defenceless Malaysian student.

Russian and Ukrainian authorities yesterday said they had uncovered a terrorist plot to assassinate Vladimir Putin, an announcement that raised eyebrows owing to its disclosure only days before the presidential elections.

Chechen man arrested before telling state TV his 'goal' was to murder Russia's Prime Minister

Trust your eyes, not your mobile