Television
The Best of the Week
SUNDAY MAY 6
Car SOS (TVNZ Duke, 7.00pm). Lovely cars are lovingly revived in this British series featuring engineer Tim Shaw and mechanic Fuzz Townshend. Season one includes a Ford Sierra RS Cosworth, a Ford Anglia, a Rover P6, a Volkswagen Type 1 Beetle, a Triumph Stag and a Lotus Elan. Fun pop fact: Townshend is also a drummer, who has played with Pop Will Eat Itself and Bentley Rhythm Ace. There’s more vehiclerelated excitement in the new season of Top Gear (Prime, Monday, 8.30pm), which has survived in the post-Clarkson era and, according to some UK reviewers, has hit its stride this season. The main presenters are now Matt LeBlanc and journalist and racing driver Chris Harris. Making occasional appearances are German racing driver Sabine
Schmitz and former motorsport team boss
Eddie Jordan. The season begins with a road trip in Utah in some new V8 sports cars, including the McLaren 570GT. Rob Brydon is this week’s guest star.
Russia with Simon Reeve (Prime, 7.30pm). He always seems so cheerful, that
Simon Reeve, even when he’s traversing the most dangerous places on Earth, or when he’s being harassed by statesecurity agents during his new three-part series. Reeve has a knack for finding the unusual: in the first episode he meets reindeer herders in the remotest part of the country, visits a mega-casino designed to attract wealthy Chinese tourists and explores the effect of global warming on some areas in the east that had been frozen for millennia.
MONDAY MAY 7
’Allo ’Allo! (Jones!, Sky 008, 7.25pm). The trick, says Vicki Michelle, who plays sexy waitress Yvette Carte-Blanche, is to make fun of everyone. The French, the Germans and the British are all ridiculous in the beloved farce set in wartime France that began in 1982 and ran for 10 years. Listen carefully: an interview with Michelle will be on our website noted.co.nz on May 7.
Trust (SoHo, Sky 010, 9.30pm). Anthology TV series based on real events are so hot right now: British screenwriter
Simon Beaufoy, whose CV includes The Full Monty and Slumdog Millionaire, takes on the story of the Getty family, at one time the richest in America. He ropes in his frequent collaborator Danny Boyle for three of the 10 episodes, which cover the kidnapping, in 1973, of John Paul Getty III. Donald Sutherland plays the notorious patriarch J Paul Getty, known for his penny-pinching and womanising. He famously refused to pay the ransom for his 16-year-old grandson, eventually negotiating down to the maximum amount that was tax-deductible. Some US reviewers have suggested Trust might kick off “the Brendan Fraser renaissance”, as the actor plays Getty Sr’s head of security, James Fletcher Chace. The cast also features Hilary Swank as John Paul
III’s mother Gail, and young British actor Harris Dickinson plays the unfortunate kidnappee.
TUESDAY MAY 8
The Great Pottery Throw Down (Sky Arts, Sky 020, 7.00pm). The second season of this lovely series will be the last: apparently baking is more interesting than pottery. The amateur potters in season two include a model, a cage fighter and an accountant, who do wonderful things with wheels and glaze. Mesmerising.
Shetland (Vibe, Sky 006, 8.30pm). Just like the equally excellent Welsh series Hinterland, it is always bleak, cold and probably raining in Shetland, the series based on novels of Ann Cleeves (who also created Vera Stanhope). As Shetland is a group of islands 100km north of Scotland, there are also gale-force winds. These days, there are original stories for Cleeves’s detective Jimmy Perez (Douglas Henshall), and in season three, it’s one overarching story that takes Perez and his underling “Tosh” Macintosh (Alison O’Donnell) into the den of a vicious Glasgow gangster. The connection is a menacing “businessman”, played by the commanding Ciáran Hinds. Archie Punjabi, Anna Chancellor and Julie Graham also star.
WEDNESDAY MAY 9
Ewan and Colin McGregor: RAF Centenary (Choice TV, 7.30pm). Actor Ewan McGregor and his RAF pilot brother Colin have
previously explored Britain’s wartime aviation history in the documentaries The Battle of Britain and Bomber Boys. Here they are let loose on 100 years of RAF history, which means that Colin gets to fly some of the planes that defended Britain over the past century, from a World War I replica
BE2 to a supersonic Typhoon, the fighter used over Syria and Iraq. The brothers meet a chap who fought in the Battle of Britain; two Cold War airmen who were tasked with dropping the atomic bomb; the last RAF pilot to take part in a dogfight; and two pioneering female flyers who delivered planes to frontline units in WWII.
THURSDAY MAY 10
Mrs Brown’s Boys Special
(TVNZ 1, 8.30pm). The good old Christmas special in
May. Maybe it’s a weather thing. If you look, you’ll see the jokes approaching from approximately 1.6km away, but Brendan O’Carroll’s creation has never claimed to be anything other than a haven for old one-liners. There is something of note in this special: Mrs Brown’s Boys is doing a sitcom actor switcheroo.
The show needs a new Rory after Rory Cowan, who has played Agnes’s son for 16 years, decided to leave. There is a literal unveiling of the new Rory when his plastic surgery bandages come off.
FRIDAY MAY 11
Rosehaven (TVNZ OnDemand, from noon). Going back to your small-town roots is a perennial favourite of TV comedy, but Aussie comedians Celia Pacquola (who stars in The Breaker Upperers) and Luke McGregor find new angles in this little charmer. McGregor plays the timid Daniel, who returns to the small Tasmanian town of Rosehaven to help his mother with the family real-estate business. His best friend Emma turns up after her husband leaves her on their honeymoon. Naturally, the town is full of characters, including Daniel’s brutally honest mother, the guy who bullied him in school, and the girl he still likes, but the show is not overplayed or sentimental.
Ash vs Evil Dead (Box Sets, Sky 009, 7.30pm). Sadly, the clever horror-comedy that employed so many Kiwis in West
Rosehaven, Friday. Auckland has been cancelled; that level of gore is an acquired taste, although the inventiveness of Kiwi art departments knows no bounds. Sky Box
Sets is screening the third and final season from 7.30pm tonight. Enjoy.
Funny Girls (Three, 9.45pm). Actually, Funnier Girls, as this show continues to get better and better, in particular the next-level musical spoofs that would make Amy Schumer jealous. Welcome back Rose Matafeo, Kim Crossman, Laura Daniel and Christchurch’s Brynley Stent, who impressed last year’s International Comedy Festival audiences with her show Escape from Gloriavale.