What a weird world we inhabit when it comes to popular culture or indeed to any culture high or low. Recently we wanted to have a look at that grand old film The African Queen directed in 1950 by the great John Huston in the wake of The Maltese Falcon and Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart at his most earthy and Katharine Hepburn at her most stately, improbably sharing a small imperilled boat in the waters of German East Africa during the first world war.

Now we’re all aware that the internet gives us some version of what Andre Malraux called the Imaginary Museum when he elucidated the idea that modernism made the cave paintings at Lascaux contemporary with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. So with the huge range of streaming services offering classic movie selections (as well as the chance, if it comes to it, of hiring them for a couple of dollars) you would think the film Bogart won the Oscar for against Brando’s Stanley in Streetcar would have to be available.

Well, no. What was in the offing, however, was a doco on YouTube about the making of The African Queen with people like Martin Scorsese talking about how wonderful the film is and the legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff saying the way he shot the film was quite ordinary, the magic was all John Huston’s. There are amusing details with Katharine Hepburn saying that Bogart and Huston drank nothing but whisky and that she drank the water which was polluted and got dysentery and all the stomach wogs known to humankind. The juxtaposition of that Bryn Mawr voice with Bogart’s nuggety tones and Huston’s swashbuckling big game hunter’s voice – though his real prize was always his source which was more or less what he could toy with whether it was Moby Dick or The Night of the Iguana.

His Moby Dick has a monolithically modulated Gregory Peck as Melville’s Ahab although the voice that was made for that part and which animates the figure of Father Mapple in Huston’s film is Orson Welles who actually adapted this impossible epic for the stage with Rod Steiger – remember him as Brando’s brother in On the Waterfront and the Southern police chief who finds himself collaborating with Sidney Poitier in that Sixties thriller In the Heat of the Night? (‘What they call you, boy?’ the old racist says and the African-American voice comes back at him, ‘They call me Mr.Tibbs.’)

Well, if you want the music of American English Steiger rivals Welles and Brando and James Earl Jones. One of my friends was raving recently about the treasures of YouTube and particularly about the Dick Cavett interviews especially the extraordinary one with Orson Welles and the very helpful nod of approval he got from Winston Churchill. And YouTube is the supreme repository of the treasures of the past if you happen to know what you’re looking for.

As it happens our next attempt to locate a classic was the opposite of our experience with The African Queen. Prime offers you two film versions of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies: the 1962 version in black and white by the theatre director Peter Brook and then the 1990 one with a script by Jay Presson Allan who did the stage adaptation of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie which ultimately became the film with Maggie Smith as the schoolmarm who inspires her ‘gels’.

The depiction of the boys on the island in Peter Brooks’ Lord of the Flies has the strength of very fine acting and is also very well shot but it’s almost like a doco of the novel it derives from because none of the incidents – the revelation that comes to Simon, the plight of Piggy – is dramatised with any tonal feeling for the enactment of the drama even though Brooks’ script is scrupulously accurate.

It’s the 1962 version we get glimpses of in the BBC doco The Dreams of William Golding which you can find on YouTube and which is a reminder of the glory days of British documentary and the fact that they were not so long ago. We hear from John Carey of Oxford who wrote the biography and from Melvyn Bragg about getting stupendously drunk with Golding and then letting him drive him back to town. And there’s the full astonishing story of how the great firm of Faber & Faber almost failed to publish Lord of the Flies. It was the then young Charles Monteith who persuaded Geoffrey Faber and T.S. Eliot – the great warlords of the firm – to risk it after it had been rejected by one of the readers. And he worked at it, insisting that Golding cut back all the earlier stuff about the boys on the plane.

The upshot was a book that had a secular credibility for all Golding’s dark broodings about religion and spirituality. Golding was capable of talking about the blackness of the darkness of purgatory as the vision of the mercy of God and other inscrutabilities that are hardly cheery.

It’s a superb doco and we have Benedict Cumberbatch both reading The Spire and acting in Golding’s late naval epic trilogy Rites of Passage. Cumberbatch is interviewed and talks intelligently about the closeness of civilisation and barbarism. We get Stephen King. We get Golding’s very impressive daughter talking of her father’s infatuation with a young American researcher and see the woman herself as a middle-aged professor.

Golding’s son shared a lot of his father’s serious preoccupations but in him they were continuous with an ongoing mental illness which the novelist escaped from for all his enduring gloom.

But this is a marvellous portrait of a great writer and everyone who has ever gaped at those little boys screaming to kill the beast in that small masterpiece that rivals Camus’ L’Étranger like nothing else in English will be staggered by how much reality it takes in.

Golding was an extraordinarily uncompromising writer and with his deep love of classical Greek literature he liked to think of his books as mythic because as with Aristotle’s use of mythos (plot) the story had taken the only form it could.