Give Shakespeare another chance

The die is cast early on in Shakespeare Uncovered: Richard II with Derek Jacobi. Although Richard II is set in the distant past, we’re told, this play that tells of the sad stories of the death of kings is hugely relevant to the present — and not just because of homicidal cretins with names like Bashar, Muammar and Saddam.

In the opening moments of Friday’s first-of-twopart look at Shakespeare’s most influential plays, Sir Derek Jacobi embarks on a pilgrimage to Westminster Abbey and reads the inscription off King Richard II’s tomb, including the part where it says, “He laid low anyone who violated the royal prerogative.” Until he was deposed, that is.

In history, King Richard II was famous for, among other things, putting down the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Today the peasants are watching television.

And why not? For it was television that introduced Jacobi to a mass audience with the mid 1970s adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

The result is the best kind of historical documentary — both art and entertainment, interweaving the past and present into one seamless strip.

Jacobi played Richard II for BBC-TV more than 30 years ago, and one of the most revealing moments in Friday’s program is when he forces himself to sit down and critique his performance from a scratchy, old film.

Jacobi then ventures to the University of London and then Oxford, to buttonhole historians over Shakespeare’s sources and identify where fiction meets fact.

In a rousing news conference with TV critics last month, Jeremy Irons — the host and narrator of Friday’s second program, Shakespeare Uncovered: Henry IV & Henry V with Jeremy Irons — railed against how badly Shakespeare is taught in schools, where it’s often shoved down pupils’ throats.

If you were one of those unfortunates who learned to hate Shakespeare in school, do give Shakespeare Uncovered a second chance. You may be pleasantly surprised. (PBS)

• CBC’s venerable newsmagazine, the fifth estate, claims to tell the true story of how the CIA tracked down the world’s most wanted man in Target bin Laden, presumably without the violence and torture of Zero Dark Thirty. (CBC)

• A rabbi from St. Paul, Minn., tries to sell Kevin O’Leary, Robert Herjavec and the others on the idea of a “power-free magnetic sound enhancer” for the iPad on Shark Tank. It’s true what they say: You really can’t make this stuff up. (CTV, ABC)

• That nice, mild-mannered chef Gordon Ramsay travels to the bucolic town of Beaver, Penn., and sits down to a quiet plate of pasta at Levanti’s Italian Restaurant in Kitchen Nightmares, only to be treated to a frontrow seat as the restaurant owners try to throttle each other on the spot.

Why can’t Ramsay get to eat in peace on this show? And the food … don’t get him started on the food. (Global, Fox)