Her persistent questioning, wobbly camerawork and shots of the boom microphone held by Sarah Jeans - the only other person in the two-strong crew - are all left in the final cut, but they enhance rather than overwhelm the subject matter.She describes her style as "not fly-on-the-wall, but more of a grown- up home movie People are just talking to me It's a bastardised version of cinema verite. But after a few months, they see that you might have a serious purpose and that you're not just going to show them as the upper classes jumping over candelabras."Unlike, say, Nick Broomfield (The Leader, the Driver and the Driver's Wife ; Aileen Wuornos: the Selling of a Serial Killer ; Tracking Down Maggie), she intrudes into her films without taking them over No one- trick pony, she. When I first entered the officers' mess for this film, some turned their backs on me They hate everything about you because you're a media bod. "Casting is obviously key, but what I love is to cement a relationship with a subject, to get them to have a rapport with the camera.

"Looking back on it, she has a very subtle and clever technique She puts you at your ease. Once she's done that, she's able to get a more accurate picture of what we're like People then relax for the camera."Dineen takes up the theme. In this series, she gets things out of Major Crispin Black that I've only heard from Republicans before - and yet he and the Army are still pleased with it."Major Black, the likeable subject of "The Commander", the first in the series, explains how she does it. She has been accused - on The Ark, for instance - of "going native" with her subjects, but her sympathy for their stories lends her documentaries a rare warmth. "She's got that unique ability to get under the skin of her subjects - especially men," Hamann says. "Whether it's men digging the roads or the more posh people in the Army, she has them eating out of her hand No one else does that.

Some years ago, I was given the award of Documentary-Makers' Documentary-Maker and asked who I admired. The person I made number one was Molly Dineen - the future of British documentary-making."What distinguishes her films is their humanity. Her last series, The Ark, about London Zoo, picked up a Bafta. Paul Hamann, head of documentaries at the BBC, finds it difficult to contain his admiration for the woman he describes as "one of the best film-makers in the world. But we get the results, and that's what counts."It is indeed.

Dineen's films - about such diverse subjects as a retired colonel in Kenya, Irish roadworkers and the Angel Tube station - have won awards and critical bouquets in equal measure. But it matters little when the finished product confirms you, at the age of 36, as one of Britain's leading documentary makers.Maggie Young, Dineen's long-suffering associate producer, takes a break from frantic administrative calls to smile indulgently at her producer/director "Whatever I organise, you disorganise. "I can't bear it not to be as right as it can be." More than two years' work for three hours' airtime - not a very productive ratio. Even now, a week before transmission, she is still tinkering with it. She rushes over to the desk and makes the editor replay the opening titles over and over to get sound and vision just so. "I love doing this," she says. She has a framed photo of the Prince of Wales's Company in one hand, the remains of a tinfoil- tray meal in the other, and a coat and a briefcase tucked under her arms. Since August 1993 she has been working flat out on her latest three-part documentary, In the Company of Men, about the British Army in Ulster.