THELMA & LOUISE

5STAR, 11.35pm

Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon star respectively as the eponymous school friends who decide to go on an adventurous road trip in this Oscar-winning buddy film from which the final scene has become iconic. Thelma is the dowdy housewife, Louise the naive free spirit, but the real star is director Ridley Scott, who gives his characters freedom while winding them into a taut, tragic plot. Look out for a young Brad Pitt.

With live sport off the menu for the foreseeable future, we’ll be bringing you a rundown of what’s on offer on the best of the streaming services, beginning with…

British broadcasters can knock out gripping, gritty dramas blindfolded, so it’s no surprise that Britbox is full of the best dramatic gems from the last few decades. The pick of the bunch is ITV’s moody crime series Broadchurch, which begins with David Tennant and Olivia Colman as partners investigating the murder of a child in the fictional coastal town of Broadchurch in Dorset. Punchy, well-written and atmospheric, it’s worth watching all three series back to back and in full, if you can find the time. The BBC’s big budget 2018 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, starring Dominic West as Jean Valjean, is on song, even though it has no tunes. It makes a promising start, capturing the novel’s epic quality, but struggles to contain the story within six episodes. More evenly paced is two-part period drama Small Island, about Jamaican immigrants arriving in Britain after the Second World War, and featuring a host of British stars at the start of their careers. Pride and Prejudice, adapted by the BBC in 1995 from Jane Austen’s novel, more or less invented the modern period drama. Jennifer Ehle plays Elizabeth Bennet, while Colin Firth is the ostensibly dashing Mr Darcy – although the credibility of that portrayal is a matter of conjecture.

We seem to be going through a fallow period for British comedy, with few genuinely funny new shows making their mark. Nevertheless, there are a host of genre-defining classics here. Both nearperfect seasons of Fawlty

Towers are included. A post-Monty Python John Cleese, somehow funnier than ever as neurotic hotel manager Basil Fawlty, is backed up by Andrew Sachs’s bumbling Manuel. There’s also Porridge, helmed by another stalwart of British comedy, Ronnie Barker, who plays happygo-lucky jailbird Fletch, making the best of life on the inside. The Good Life seems pertinent to modern times with its vision of a couple who give up the rat race to become ecologically self-sufficient. So too is the enduringly brilliant Yes Minister which has found new life in memes and clips online at the expense of today’s politicians, but deserves to be seen in full.

1991

One of BritBox’s best additions is its collection of David Attenborough films, which receive a dedicated section on the platform. The BBC’s natural history team are peerless in their ability to capture the most remarkable aspects of the natural world, from the oceans of Blue Planet to the animal kingdoms of Dynasties, and their footage is complemented by that familiarly soothing commentary. Michael Palin: Full Circle provides an equally insightful, if slightly more jovial, perspective of a very human planet, while Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe looks beyond the stars. The Up series, beginning with the inaugural Seven Up! (1964), is one of the most remarkable exercises in British film-making, following 14 seven-yearolds through life to explore the influence of class on a child’s growth. The most recent update aired last year. Jack Taylor

Giant cuttlefish are the stars of Attenborough’s Blue Planet

David Tennant and Olivia Colman star in Broadchurch