TV & Radio
Highlights and listings
DOCUMENTARY Sylvia Plath: Life Inside The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath’s iconic novel The Bell Jar exploded the myth that women were content and life was sweet. It shone a light on 1950s gender politics, sexual identity and mental health at a time when women struggled to find a voice.
Life Inside The Bell Jar is the first documentary about Plath’s classic semi-autobiographical novel. In it Frieda Hughes talks about her mother in depth for the first time on camera, and film-makers had unprecedented access to people who knew Plath, many of whom are talking publicly for the first time.
Today, BBC2, 9pm
FAMILY Searching For Mum: Sri Lanka
More than 11,000 people who were born in Sri Lanka have been adopted overseas, many growing up with little knowledge of the people or culture they left behind. This moving two-parter follows two women – both adopted as babies and raised in London and northern Scotland respectively – as they return to Sri Lanka to try to find their birth families. They are searching not just for their relatives, but also for their lost identity, uncovering a murky world of adoption agencies and obfuscating lawyers and officials on the way.
Thursday, BBC2, 9pm
ART
Fake Or Fortune?
In the first of a new five-part series, Fiona Bruce and art expert Philip Mould try to establish if a still life of a glass jug and pears is the work of British artist William Nicholson.
The investigation begins after the painting is rejected by the leading authority on Nicholson and left out of the artist’s latest catalogue raisonnée – the official list of all his known works. The only problem is that the owner bought the painting in 2006 for £165,000, believing it to be genuine. If it’s not the real deal, it will be worth practically nothing.
So begins the painstaking search for clues, which takes the team to Canada as well as to meet reformed art forger John Myatt.
Tomorrow, BBC1, 9pm
NATURE
Orangutan Jungle School
This ten-part docu-soap follows the fortunes of a group of orphaned orangutans as they progress through a unique forest school system in Borneo. Prepare to have your heartstrings firmly tugged.
Wednesday, Channel 4, 8pm
FOOD Jamie Cooks Italy/ Great British Menu
Great food in Italy isn’t about Michelin stars, it’s about traditional home cooking, so in Jamie Cooks Italy, Jamie Oliver and his mentor Gennaro Contaldo travel around the country to learn Italy’s best-kept secrets from the true masters of the Italian kitchen – the nonnas and home cooks who have perfected recipes that have been handed down over generations. The first of eight episodes begins on the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily at the height of summer. Future episodes visit Puglia, Tuscany and Rome.
Meanwhile, the first of a staminatesting 45 episodes of Great British
Menu returns with professional chefs competing for the right to cook a feast celebrating 70 years of the NHS. Monday, Channel 4, 8:30pm; Monday to Wednesday and Friday, BBC2, 7:30pm
CRIME The Detectives: The Farmhouse Robbery
A documentary telling the inside story of how detectives from Lancashire Police investigated an armed robbery at a remote farmhouse where the owner was tied up and various items stolen including seven hunting rifles and hiscar.■
Thursday, STV, 9pm