The very best of the week ahead
Today Top Gear BBC One, 8pm
The final episode of the series pulls out gently before shifting gears for a screeching season finale. In a segment celebrating 100 years of the BBC, hosts Paddy McGuinness, Freddie Flintoff and Chris Harris don tweeds to race a classic car at a sedate pace through muddy English forests, a sport known as road trials. It’s the only part featuring Flintoff, who was presumably off filming his new series, Field of Dreams. The meat of the show – reviewing and comparing cars – sees Harris in Norway to try out the Ford Puma on snowy roads; McGuinness taking us through the history of BMW’s high-performance M Division; the pair racing cars on a runway; and, finally, Harris giving car enthusiasts hope that the phasing out of fossil fuels needn’t mean the end of sexy motoring because synthetic fuels are the future. The studio-bound scripted segments are kept brief and the show comes alive in the driving sections. This trio really know their stuff, which is perhaps why the show is still firing on all cylinders. Vicki Power
McDonald & Dodds ITV, 8pm
The cops should arrest Sarah Parish for stealing all her scenes in the crime drama tonight. She plays a tough businesswoman channelling Tina Turner at the karaoke machine and ends up implicated in a death at her plastic-surgery clinic. VP
Monday The Extraordinary Life of April Ashley Channel 4, 10pm
There’s no overstatement PICK in the title of this
OF THE documentary about WEEK a woman
who ho refused to be defined by what others thought she was. as. So full and remarkable le were Ashley’s 86 years ars (she died last December), mber), it could easily have comprised two o or three parts. Bolstered olstered by wonderfully y eccentric archive ive from everything ng from Parkinson n to Loose Women to vintage newsreel, it tells lls the story of a working-class
pioneer from Liverpool who defied her conservative, borderline abusive upbringing and medical and societal attempts to confine her, to become the ninth person to undergo gender reassignment surgery, in 1960. From there, Ashley became a model and entered high society, surviving alcoholism, being outed in the tabloids and a ruinous divorce case in which a judge ruled her to be male, eventually settling in Hay-on-Wye, where she would defuse curious locals with “everyone knows handmade is better than mass-produced”, p , among other aphorisms. Omar Sharif, Peter O’Toole and Winston Churchillm Churchill make anecdotal appearances in this effervescent film; Boy George, G Simon Callow and Grayson Perry Per are among the contributors. Gabriel Gabri Tate
Live: Summer S on the Farm Fa
Channel Chann 5, 8pm Helen Skelton returns to Cannon Hall Farm in South Yorkshire Yorkshir with Martin Hughes-Games Hughe in tow. With W much of the th farming industry indu in
financial turmoil, there are also timely calls to eat local and look after our countryside, alongside classic summer recipes, mythbusting, lambing and much else besides over the week. GT
Tuesday
Freddie Flintoff ’s Field of Dreams
BBC One, 8pm
Cricket remains a game for Britain’s posh kids: two thirds of England’s last Ashes squad were privately educated. But former all-rounder Flintoff, who went to state school, wants to get more middle and working-class boys into the game. He returns to his hometown of Preston, Lancashire, to introduce cricket to the city’s youth and prove that it can be just as compelling as football and rugby. The 26 Preston lads who answer his call are a rowdy bunch with little interest in the sport. As a result, many of them don’t even know who Flintoff is. But the cricket superstar and his assistants, former players Alex Tudor and Kyle Hogg, manage to coax the boys into staying. Flintoff takes interest in a few choice characters, such as 15-year-old Sean, who’s been excluded from numerous
schools due to his bad behaviour, and we watch as Sean and others blossom under the full beam of Flintoff ’s attention. A real testament to the power of sport. Vicki Power
Ghislaine Maxwell: The Making of a Monster
Channel 4, 10pm
Following Ghislaine Maxwell’s sentencing last week, this three-part series explores how the rich daughter
of a British media baron became a sex trafficker. It’s well-worn ground but this does offer different acquaintances to those in recent Netflix and BBC biographies. Here, they establish Maxwell’s character and relate tales of her behaviour. VP
Wednesday MOTD Live: UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 – England v Austria BBC One, 7pm
The biggest football event of the summer finally gets underway with England hosting the 16-team Women’s Euros, with the Lionesses hoping to progress beyond the semi-final defeats that have plagued them of late. Uefa has billed the 13th Women’s Euros as “the biggest ever” and with 100,000 international fans expected to travel for matches, and an anticipated global television audience of 250million, it’s easy to see why. Tickets have already sold out for all of England’s group stage matches and the final at Wembley on July 31, so the BBC – which is covering all 31 matches in the tournament – could be the sole option for many fans to follow their side’s progress. England face a winnable opening match against Austria at Old Trafford (kick-off is at 8pm), although when they last met in November, England only scraped a narrow victory via a single goal. Gabby Logan presents, with analysis from Alex Scott, Fara Williams and Jonas Eidevall, and commentary by Robyn Cowen and Rachel Brown-Finnis. Gerard O’Donovan
Boys from the Blackstuff BBC Four, from 10pm
Alan Bleasdale’s influential 1982 drama about a gang of unemployed Liverpool labourers who try to find work in the recession-hit Merseyside of the later Thatcher years. The first three episodes air tonight, while the remaining two are on next week. GO
Thursday
The Baby Sky Atlantic, 9pm & 9.40pm
The Baby burrows deep into both motherhood and the equally profound situation of choosing not to have children: Natasha (Michelle de Swarte, a comedian and former model in an accomplished debut lead) is in the latter camp. For her, babies simply get in the way of a rich life of poker nights, smoking and deep conversations with friends (Isy Suttie and Shvorne Marks) – all the things that make life fun. Yet when fate literally drops a gurgling infant into her arms, she must not only deal with rearing an unwanted child but also the possibility that this baby has chosen her. Why else would it appear to be bumping off those in its way and convincing those around her that it was, in fact, hers all along? A pitch-black vein of comedy runs through the core of this unsettling premise, following all its horrific turns, deftly plotted by relative newcomers Siân Robins-Grace and Lucy Gaymer, and given a thoroughly disorientating score by Lucrecia Dalt. GT
Secrets of the London Underground Yesterday, 8pm
The final episode finds Tim Dunn at Baker Street (the tube station with the most platforms), while Siddy Holloway pays a visit to the disused Edgware Road Signal Cabin, in the company of the last person to operate it. GT
Friday
Black Bird
Apple TV+
Created and written by Dennis Lehane, master of the psychological crime novel, this six-part drama is the thrilling antidote to forgettable summer TV. Even better, it’s based on a true story. Set in the US Midwest in the
1990s, it stars Taron Egerton ( Rocketman) as a cocky, well-heeled drug dealer, Jimmy Keene, who runs out of road and lands a heavy jail sentence. He’s then thrown a lifeline: in exchange for a get-out-of-jail-free card, he must befriend an inmate convicted of murder and coax information from him about where the bodies are buried. The action scrolls between that story and one set years earlier, in which cop Brian Miller (Greg Kinnear) investigates one of the relevant murder cases. Adding star power is Ray Liotta as Keene’s father, an ex-cop, heartbroken at how his boy has turned out. Liotta is as magnetic as ever in what turned out to be his final TV role. Director Michaël R Roskam effortlessly manages the oscillation between scenes of cop business, prison action and murder that are preceded by a terrible sense of foreboding. VP
One Question
Channel 4, 8pm
Unlike high-stakes game shows with their blue lights and intense music, Claudia Winkleman’s gentle outing has everyone on comfy sofas and chatting casually as they compete for a hefty £100,000. Yet it’s still tense and involving. VP