Television
The Best of the Week
SATURDAY JANUARY 20
Horse Racing: Wellington Cup Day – Thorndon Mile (Prime, 5.00pm). Cup Day is jumping the gun this year – traditionally the hats and bubbles come out on the last Saturday of January. But the vital statistics for the Thorndon Mile remain the same: it’s a biggie, a Group 1 1600m race, with a purse of $200,000. Thee Auld Floozie won last year and Prince of Passion came in second. But in my (wholly unhorsey) books it was Abidewithme that triumphed: the mare came in third, even though she was in foal.
MONDAY JANUARY 22
Live from the Red Carpet: the 2018 Screen Actors Guild Awards (E!, 014, midday). A Sag win is considered an excellent indication of Oscar success in March. But I suspect many of the women treading the red carpets will be feeling pretty triumphant already. As I write, the Golden Globes have just wrapped and the world is newly in awe of Oprah Winfrey. A presidential candidate for 2020? On the back of that speech, anything’s possible. At the Globes, awards were incidental. We just witnessed some of the world’s most powerful women standing together and saying enough is bloody well enough. Sexual harassment? Sexism? Not having it. The women wore black and they did not come to party. Speech after speech demanded change. Natalie Portman dropped a zinger on stage. “And here are all the male nominees,” she said, before presenting the award for Best Director. On the red carpet, Debra Messing called out E! for paying its male broadcasters more than its females. And in a spectacular moment of poor judgment, when Ryan Seacrest was interviewing the woman who started it all – Tarana Burke, founder of the anti-sexual harassment movement Me Too – E!’s cameras cut that footage down to a tiny box while going fullscreen for a shot of Dakota Johnson’s dress. Time’s up, indeed. Here’s hoping E! has smartened up its act for the Sags.
Black Caps v Pakistan (Sky Sport 1, 051, 3.30pm). With both teams sitting near the top of the T20 rankings,
Pakistan’s tour of New Zealand should be interesting. The first T20 is on today at Westpac Stadium in Wellington and the second, at Eden Park, is on Thursday at 6.30pm (again on SS1).
I Am Heath Ledger (Three, 8.30pm). It’s 10 years to the day since Australian actor Heath Ledger took a handful of prescription opioids and benzodiazepines in his SoHo apartment. But his lonely death, ruled an accident, is almost incidental to this fascinating, intimate view of his life. Much of it was filmed as home movies by the star himself – grinning, winking, spinning in circles, throwing his arms wide open. “We’re going to go on a mission right now,” he promises early on. “Will you come with me?” Co-directors Derik Murray and Adrian Buitenhuis have edited that footage beautifully with scenes from his greatest performances ( The Dark Knight, Brokeback Mountain) and sensitive interviews with close friends and family. Little is said about his personal life – Michelle Williams, the mother of his daughter, did not participate and has never talked about Ledger – but the star’s brilliance and energy are
enough to sustain this tribute.
TUESDAY JANUARY 23
The Great Australian Bake Off (Prime, 7.30pm). “Janice has a secret and fatty weapon up her sleeve.” So begins tonight’s episode, in which the nine remaining contestants valiantly attempt to summit that pinnacle of baking: the pie. Clearly there’s nothing better than a 2am BP mince’n’cheese, but these guys aren’t mucking around: chicken, lemon thyme, wild mushrooms, pork and sage? Ah, yes, please.
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 24
Ready for Takeoff (Prime, 7.30pm). A second season of the Qantas vehicle launches with a departure lounge full of sozzled Fifos (fly-in fly-out workers), a proposal in the outback and a runway lesson of a different sort with Next Top Model strut guru Jay Alexander.
Elizabeth Smart: Autobiography (Crime + Investigation, Sky
071, 9.30pm; encores Fridays, 8.30pm). In this two-part documentary the astonishingly resilient Elizabeth Smart, now 30, stares down the barrel of the camera and tells her story, her way. “Terror. Boredom. Rape,” she summarises, matterof-factly. To briefly recap: when she was 14, Smart was abducted at knifepoint from her family home and marched through the Utah hills to a campsite. There, she was “married” to and repeatedly raped by her abductor, Brian Mitchell, a self-styled prophet. Mitchell’s wife, Wanda
Barzee, was his accomplice. Smart spent nine months in captivity, and one of the most powerful aspects of her story is her vehement defence of her decision not to scream out or reveal herself when Mitchell and Barzee started taking her out (heavily veiled) in public. “He was the master; I was the slave,” she says, later adding, “The truth is I made my rescue possible. I want people to know that.” Production values are much higher than your
run-of-the-mill true-crime feature, and many police and family members are interviewed. This is a thoughtful and highly watchable doco – although obviously, all the trigger warnings apply.
THURSDAY JANUARY 25
The Truth About Your Teeth (Living Channel, 017, 8.30pm). To test whether you have bad breath, lick your wrist, let it dry, then do a sniff test. Tooth knocked out? Pick it up by the tooth bit – not the sensitive root – lick it to remove any dirt and pop it back into the gum quick smart. Don’t, whatever you do, put it in water: the all-important cells on the surface of the root will explode. Cringe, flinch, wince: it’s one of those shows. Along the lines of Embarrassing Bodies, the series documents six months in one of the
UK’s busiest dental hospitals, meeting patients in desperate dental need and the professionals who treat them. They also investigate over-thecounter teeth whiteners and the other paraphernalia found on supermarket dental shelves these days. Oh, and the badbreath thing? Chew on a raw carrot – apparently the combo of fibre and water helps polish the pong away.