CATCH - UP TV IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...

The Handmaid’s Tale Channel4.com, until June 27, episodes 1&2 This adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s seminal novel does full justice to the original text. Set in a dystopic American near-future — the totalitarian Republic of Gilead, a kind of neo-Puritan hell — birth rates have fallen to crisis point through a combination of pollution and sexually transmitted diseases, so that any fertile women are forced to become ‘handmaids’, reproductive surrogates, essentially.

Elizabeth Moss (left) is Offred, a woman captured, separated from her child, renamed, and given to a Gilead commander (Joseph Fiennes), and his cold, resentful wife (Yvonne Strahovski), as their ‘handmaid’. Which means she is ceremonially raped by the commander, while her head is laid symbolically in his wife’s lap. Moss is excellent, as always, but so is everything about this. Famously, Atwood put nothing in the book that hadn’t already happened — so every act of violence, cruelty and repression is based on fact, some remote, some more modern. Perhaps it is this that makes the series so very believably, bleak and shocking. Worryingly, when Atwood first published the book, in 1985, it seemed a distinctly more far-fetched proposition than it does today. Big Brother TV3 Player, until July 5 Yes, sadly, it’s back. Emma Willis hosts the live launch and meets this year’s crop of housemates, several of whom will already be familiar to watchers of MTV’s Ex On The Beach and Ibiza Weekender. One such was Ellie Young, who got off to a good start by saying “What’s he called? That orange man... he became President. If he can do that, then maybe I can win Big Brother!” She was joined by Arthur Fulford, son of Lord Francis Fulford and star of The F***ing Fulfords and Life of Toff, among others. The days when Big Brother seemed a legitimate, often fascinating, social experiment are, of course, long gone, and the last few years have seen contestants arriving with the apparently clear aim of behaving as outrageously as possible from the get-go. EMILY HOURICAN