This likeable, solid documentary spanning David Hockney's glittering 50-year career is, we are told, the definitive Hockney chronicle. We're not so sure about that. Certainly, the Bradford-born artist has opened up his archives and collections for the perusal of the team behind the award-winning film Lucian Freud: Painted Life. There are contributions from friends and associates and his sister Margaret, who recalls that the younger David would draw on anything, "even a bus ticket".

There are a few interesting historical titbits: the way David would draw fantasies involving Cliff Richard as if he “were a schoolgirl”, a giant turquoise teddy he used to own, his early obsession with the “pictures; not the movies but the pictures”, and the guiding advice he received from his father: “Never worry too much about what the neighbours think.”

But for an artist who has undergone some traumatic recent events, including his 2012 stroke and the death of his 23-year-old assistant last March, Hockney is curiously short on drama and questions.

It’s interesting to note that, in life and in paintings, the artist viewed his own homosexuality as a source of fun, but, typically for this new doc, the point is raised only to be dropped again until Aids pops up on the timeline. “Wider perspectives are needed now,” says the subject. And yet director Randall Wright doesn’t properly contextualise Hockney’s work or tease out the connections that link Hockney to Bacon, or his place in British Pop Art, or the relationship between British pop art and the Warholian variety.

The finished feature works well as a Hockney primer, but it's nothing we haven't seen before in the many TV documentaries made about the same artist over the years. It's not nearly as interesting as Jack Hazan's faux fly-on-the-wall film, A Bigger Splash (1974) and it's not nearly as eye-opening as it ought to be.