The Book That Changed My Life review – these joyful tales of the power of reading are TV magic

Gleam in her eye … Queen Camilla in The Book That Changed My Life. Photograph: BBC/Blink FilmsView image in fullscreenGleam in her eye … Queen Camilla in The Book That Changed My Life. Photograph: BBC/Blink FilmsReviewThe Book That Changed My Life review – these joyful tales of the power of reading are TV magicWonderful, exuberant stories spill out in these honest tales of lives genuinely transformed by literature – while Queen Camilla has an off-with-their-heads moment

You have to love a documentary in which Queen Camilla reveals that as a teenager one of her favourite books was The Scarlet Pimpernel because “I was sort of obsessed at that time by the guillotine”. ’I’m sorry, what? Could we back up a moment? I have a few more questions I’d like to ask.

Alas, she goes on to refer to the tricoteuses in A Tale of Two Cities as “ghastly women”, so hopes of Camilla’s coronation as the end of a very long seditious play by the Shands are ultimately dashed. But if anyone was ever going to be an aristocratic sleeper agent primed to bring down the monarchy from within, it would be Camilla. Clearly born the very gamest of girls, she has a gleam in her eye as she recalls her younger self that still makes you wonder …

Anyway. While we wait for the ultimate truth to reveal itself, there is much to divert and – somehow, even in this godforsaken year of 2026 – uplift us in The Book That Changed My Life. Made by the BBC in partnership with the Open University and in collaboration with the Queen’s Reading Room to mark the close of the National Year of Reading, it does a wonderful, if markedly unsentimental, job of illuminating the transformative power of reading. This kind of thing can easily become an emetic horror, but here the stories told by people of coming across, in extremis, books they credit with changing, and in some cases even saving, their lives are told so honestly that all the usual tonal traps for heffalumps remain resolutely undisturbed.

View image in fullscreen‘It literally, literally allows you to escape’ … former prisoner Omar Mentesh. Photograph: BBC/Blink FilmsOmar found a copy of Jack Higgins’s bestselling second world war thriller The Eagle Has Landed when he was a teenager serving a two-month sentence in Feltham prison for breaking and entering. A previous inmate had left it behind. “First time I ever read a book was in that place.” Badly injured in an accident as a child and hospitalised for a long time, he had fallen behind in school, started truanting and turned to crime. He read, he says, just well enough “to be in the scene” and breeze past the words he couldn’t understand. “To be out of the cell,” he remembers, “was amazing. It literally, literally allows you to escape.” As his reading improved, “it allowed me to cross over into the new world – the communication, the emotional regulation and understanding and the nuance to be able to be in an environment outside of crime”.

Liverpudlian truck driver Peter was born partially deaf and, like Omar, fell behind at school – “One of the worst times in the world” – and left without being able to read. The self-loathing (“thick as two short planks”, he was told) and alienation it brought, especially once his children were born, propelled him to the edge of suicide. His wife persuaded him to start a Read Easy course – one last go at learning this elusive skill. His teacher, Alison, “just got me”. The first book he read was Harry Potter. He was himself, says Peter, like a boy emerging from under the stairs and becoming a wizard. “Sounds very corny. But it’s true, innit.”

View image in fullscreenLike learning magic … truck driver Peter Lloyd. Photograph: BBC/Blink FilmsInterspersing these larger stories are shorter interviews with a variety of (non-celebrity) bookworms from all walks of life. They’re bursts of exuberance, really, going off like fireworks. A woman with pink hair (I apologise for the lack of names – I don’t know if they were added to the broadcast version but my preview didn’t have them), who was sent to a school for maladjusted children, apparently in response to her severe dyslexia, remembers tackling Wuthering Heights “one word, one word, one word” at a time until suddenly the chaos of her classroom fell away and “it’s snowing. I’m on a moor.” A man who didn’t read at all as a child (“books were just things in school”) started working through the classics after one caught his eye, and says here: “I only found out the authors were dead when I tried to email Oscar Wilde.” A fan of The Girl With the Louding Voice remembers being caught reading at a wedding. “In my defence, the bride was late and there’s only so much small talk I can endure.” If you know, you know.

And the queen does her bit, delivering anecdotes about “my husband” laughing at Wodehouse as they sit together in the evenings and read – “Quite off-putting! I can’t get back into my book!” – then remembering how she wept throughout her father’s book Previous Engagements, describing the wartime experiences he would never speak about, and always proceeding from “my simple conviction that books make life better”.

Omar delivers literacy workshops in prisons now. He started after reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. “Reading … it’s the route out of everything. It’s like abracadabra.”