Imagine... Woody Allen: a Documentary (part one), BBC One, review Give me Allan Stewart Konigsberg the child and I will give you Woody Allen the man. The comedian who, as an adult, quipped: "I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens," looked back seven decades and recalled being decidedly grumpy when told that we all die and vanish without trace. I was never the same. What's the point? Deal me out," Allen said. This was one of several illuminating moments in the first part of Robert B Weide's fascinating study of the multi-Oscar winning New York film-maker. As well as contributions from Larry David and Martin Scorsese, there were revealing insights from Allen's sister, Golden Globe-winning producer Letty Aronson. It was touching to see what an affectionate elder brother Allen, 77, had been, even as a very young boy, to his sister, now 70. In footage Allen took of his own (archetypally Jewish) mother, she admitted she had not known what to do with such an active child. "My parents wanted him to be a pharmacist," said Letty. He was the wrong person born to those parents. At least they handed on longevity genes to their death-phobic child. Allen's father lived until he was 100, his mother to 96. Allen was born to be funny. At his Brooklyn school (which he called "a curse") he was writing 50 gags a day and selling them to newspaper columnists. He soon graduated from selling jokes to delivering them as a stand-up comedian. "There was nothing about it I liked," Allen said with a grimace. His shrewd managers, Jack Rollins and Charles H Joffe, decided on saturation television coverage as the way to make him famous. He played along, even to the extent of singing Little Sir Echo with a talking dog, and boxing in a ring with a fighting kangaroo. This was not the serious Woody Allen of Interiors or Shadows and Fog. Part One was 112 minutes long but the length allowed space to discuss his prolific body of work. It was telling to see how quickly he gained control of his own film making and also how ingrained is his desire to be taken seriously. "I put a higher value on the tragic muse than the comic muse," he said, adding forlornly that films like Manhattan will have lasting value only for the beautiful background scenery. Weide clearly had unprecedented access to Allen but the personal elements were limited. It was amusing to see the way Allen works - still writing on an old typewriter and cutting and stapling sections of dialogue - and his love of jazz, Sidney Bechet in particular, shone through. His house was filled with scattered clarinet reeds. But when it came to his two failed marriages, Allen offered little more than a few jokey asides. Dealing openly with the problems around Mia Farrow and Soon-Yi Previn may present a harder challenge for part two, which goes beyond 1980. "We all know the same truths but our lives consist of how we distort it," said Allen. Even if this wasn't the whole picture, Woody Allen: a Documentary was a splendid reminder of why the man is such a unique wit.