The 1960s, the 'Sixties', the 'swinging Sixties' are all such overworked, resampled, redited constructions that it is now becoming harder and harder to understand the real implications of that titular decade. As Gerard DeGroot so succinctly puts it in The Sixties Unplugged: "Nostalgia for the Sixties is strong because so much did not survive. Revolution was never on the cards. The door of idealism was opened briefly and then slammed shut, for fear of what might enter."

Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood's film Magic Bus examines one of those brief moments of idealism and mythology, when writer Ken Kesey decided to take a group of men and women, his 'Merry Pranksters', across America, from West to East in a 1939 International Harvester school bus and to the shining beacon of post-war American optimism, the 1964 World's Fair. As much as the film chimes with DeGroot's claim that the door of idealism closed, the film is also about the opening of those Huxlian 'doors of perception' as it traces Kesey's involvement in drug trials of LSD and how, as former Kesey associate and 'prankster' Robert Stone reveals, this "psychic liberation turned out to have been developed by CIA researchers as a weapon of the Cold War."

Last month, when I reviewed Regan - the Armchair Cinema pilot for The Sweeney - I mentioned The Tyrant King, in passing, after noting that maker Euston Films was formed from the conviction of its founders that drama could be made completely on film by a unit within Thames Television.

This strategy emerged out of a number of changes affecting the commercial television industry in the late 1960s. The Pilkington committee of 1960 had imposed a high 11% levy on advertising placed with ITV. The committee also had great influence over the creation of the Television Act of 1964 from which the Independent Television Authority gained more regulatory powers over scheduling and programme making, and levies on advertising revenues were increased. Britain's economic downturn of the late 1960s impacted on the advertising industry just as the advent of colour in 1969 also forced the ITV franchises to spend more money, certainly on technical facilities and upgrading. Advertising rates for the new colour services had not yet been negotiated and in a highly competitive market that was in recession this meant that a company like Thames had to start making colour programmes for the same amount of money as the black and white productions it was currently making. With falling revenues and rising production costs, Thames considered a number of options to make and deliver their programmes.

Trevor Griffiths' compelling series Bill Brand finally gets a much deserved DVD release this month. The eleven episode drama focuses on a newly elected Labour Party Member of Parliament as he attempts to deal with the demands of his political career, his complicated family life and the assurance that his left-wing convictions survive within a Labour government clinging on to power. Many of the themes in Bill Brand are a synthesis of the single plays or episodes Griffiths had already written for theatre and television to that point, many reflecting his own background (one he described "of history, of cultures, of languages, of borders of class") and the personal conviction that drama - whether in theatre, television or film - should be capable of raising the political consciousness of a British working class audience.

At the time, he saw television in particular as a medium that could help him politically mobilise large popular audiences. Bill Brand can therefore be seen as the aims and fulfillment of a journey in television drama that Griffiths undertook from the 1960s onwards where, as Tony Williams noted in his review of the publication of the Bill Brand scripts Trevor Griffiths, Bill Brand and Political Television Drama, "Griffiths aimed at his own definition of critical realism that distinguished between the surface appearance of the world and the hidden forces of power structuring class, gender, and racial relationships."

Released in cinemas on 7th November and coming to DVD on the 14th November, Pierre Thoretton's documentary L'Amour Fou charts the 50-year relationship between fashion designer legend Yves Saint Laurent and his lover and business partner Pierre Bergé. It is a curious beast. The decadent and extravagant public life of the couple, that perhaps befits those grandees of a world wide fashion empire, is presented and contrasted with Bergé's philisophical confessional that attempts to familiarise the audience with the private life of the designer and his lover, one that was rarely ever allowed public space. Visually arresting, mixing interviews with archive footage and a staggering wealth of black and white and colour photography, the film raises questions about our attachment to objects and their real value and asks us to examine our emotional and nostalgic attraction to people, places and possessions.

As Bergé very soberly explores the nuances of his relationship with the deeply troubled designer - a shy man, haunted by depression and a dependency on alcohol and drugs - their life together is also literally deconstructed as director Thoretton gathers these revelations during the preparations for the 2009 auction of the amassed treasures and art collection that are stuffed inside each of their homes. There is a feeling that as Bergé slowly empties his soul so the various homes also unburden their walls of each sculpture and painting as all are carefully removed and sent to Christie's for what was dubbed the 'sale of the century'. As Bergé reflects on the slowly diminishing collection, "It no longer means anything. The works will fly away like birds and find some place to perch."