Storyville: Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones, BBC Four, review Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones (BBC Four) had all the raw ingredients to make a cracking documentary. Gareth Jones, born in 1905 in Barry in Wales, graduated from Cambridge in 1930 and spent the next five years working variously for Lloyd George, The Times, the Economist, Rockefeller and British intelligence. He also managed to meet Randolph Hearst, share a 16-seat aircraft with Hitler, whom he likened to a "middle-class grocer," and have dinner with Goebbels, who had a "very narrow head, like a South Wales miner." In 1935 Jones was murdered in Inner Mongolia - ostensibly by Chinese bandits, although his family believed his death was orchestrated by Moscow in retaliation for his reporting of mass starvation in Soviet Ukraine. He was 29 years old. Unfortunately, this documentary managed to make something of a pig's ear of such interesting subject matter. Whereas Jones's journalism - articulate, understated, fearless - displayed all the finest qualities of the trade, this husky narrator seemed to be auditioning for the role of voice-over man in Hollywood thriller trailers. Just when you thought he'd had his fill of the "snake pits of international intrigue," the "spymasters" and the awful background music, the tabloid style reached its comic nadir when, in melodramatic tones, he introduced a librarian with the words: "There are several people in this story called Jones." Less forgivably, there was a failure to provide proper context. Although Jones's remarkable reporting from Soviet Ukraine was well documented, especially the spineless reaction by the rest of the press corps ("Russians hungry, but not starving" ran the headline in the New York Times), it took a Google search to discover that up to 10 million people died in the famine or that Jones was awarded the Ukranian Order of Merit in 2008. Such omissions were a shame because there was no shortage of excellent material - from archive footage of Hitler with Jones in the background, to unclassified foreign office reports, to Jones's own diary and letters "I would be a flabby little coward if I ever gave up an interesting career for the mere thought of safety," he once wrote. There were also some excellent interviews and a valiant attempt, with Jones's great-nephew, to retrace his final footsteps and find out what happened to him and why (they never did). And yet all the ham-fisted hype meant that when you finally discovered that Jones was merely the best journalist of his generation, an intrepid part-time spy and a Welsh Forrest Gump who met everyone of note before his 30th birthday, you couldn't help but feel a little disappointed.