today’s television

saturday, June 24

The Good Karma Hospital ABC, 8.15pm In the premiere of The Good Karma

Hospital, there isn’t much for junior doctor Ruby Walker (Amrita Acharia,

Game of Thrones) to smile about. Her boyfriend has left her and her job is joyless. So, after seeing an ad in a hospital bathroom, she impulsively takes a job in Kerala, India. But when she arrives at the Good Karma Hospital nothing’s quite what she expected. The hospital is packed to the rafters with patients and her new boss, expat Brit doctor Lydia Fonseca (Amanda Redman, New Tricks), tells her surgery is “simple butchery with a little light needlework thrown in”. MOVIE: The Fifth Element SBS VICELAND, 8.30pm, PG (1997) Suffice to say French filmmaker Luc Besson likes his characters off-centre; in this case it’s 250 years beyond the present, with a NY cab driver (Bruce Willis) and a mysterious waif (Milla Jovovich) racing against the clock to save the world from evil. The visuals, from Jean-Paul Gaultier’s eccentric costumes to intricately detailed sets and panoramas, are dazzling and plentiful. It’s good versus evil presented with visionary gusto and not just special effects. The Great Indoors ELEVEN, 10pm Mediocre series come and go. But as the saying “It’s not what you know, but who you know” reminds us, sometimes all it takes for a ho-hum TV series to make the mark is a few well-known faces. The Great Outdoors gets over the line with Joel McHale (Community) and Stephen Fry lending their acting chops to the unremarkable story and script. Tonight, in “Roland’s Secret”, another much-loved face brings some spark, with Jane Leeves (Frasier, Hot In

Cleveland) guest-starring. Jack (McHale) gets tangled in Roland (Fry) and Brooke’s (Susannah Fielding) family drama when they both ask for his help. Father Brown ABC, 7.30pm Fancy seeing a bumbling Catholic priest embroiled in the world of boxing? The writers of

Father Brown clearly have an eye for the absurd and couldn’t resist marrying a story of muscles and punches with a rotund, elderly man of God. In “The Chedworth Cyclone”, our lovable bicycle-riding priest (Mark Williams, pictured) is drawn into the shady world of boxing – illegal betting, fixed fights and blackmail – when a local fighter is found dead in suspicious circumstances. Brown’s sleepy Cotswolds village and its horde of idiosyncratic characters are hard to resist, but it’s Williams’ gentle demeanour that really pulls the punches.