Television
The Best of the Week
SATURDAY OCTOBER 22
E-League Live (TVNZ Duke, 3.00pm). It’s sport, but not as we know it. International teams of gamers play first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and millions of people, skewing male, we’re guessing, watch.
Rugby (Sky Sport 1, Sky 051, 7.00pm). It’s been an extraordinary run for the All Blacks and they already have the Bledisloe Cup in the bag, but they will be playing for a world-record 18 wins in a row when they meet Australia at Eden Park tonight. At 5.00pm, the Black Ferns meet the Wallaroos in the first of two tests against the Australian side; the other is on October 26 at QBE Stadium. At the end of the year, the Black Ferns will play Canada, England and Ireland in the UK in the build-up to the 2017 Women’s World Cup.
SUNDAY OCTOBER 23
Hooten & the Lady (The Box,
Sky 005, 7.30pm).
A completely daffy adventure series from UK channel Sky 1 that is part Romancing the Stone, part Indiana Jones and all 80s throwback. He (Michael Landes) is a maverick adventurer, she (Ophelia Lovibond) is an aristocratic archaeologist with a hankering for getting out of the museum. There are helicopters, stunts, dangerous situations and sexual tension. Locations include the Amazon, the Sistine Chapel, the tomb of Alexander the Great, Bhutan and Ethiopia. Guilty pleasure? Quite possibly.
Sunday Theatre: Jean (TVNZ 1, 8.30pm). After portraying Katherine Mansfield, Kate Elliott is about to add another iconic New Zealander to her CV: Jean Batten, the Rotoruaborn aviator who made the first solo flight from England to New Zealand in 1936. The telefeature begins in 1934 and covers a period at the height of her
fame; to play Batten, Elliott has learnt to fish and ballroom dance, and even went so far as having flying lessons in a Gipsy Moth, the plane in which Batten made her solo flight from the UK to Australia – and back again – in 1934.
Lewis (Prime, 8.35pm). That’s it, and there won’t be any more. After nine years and 33 episodes, Kevin Whately’s Robert Lewis, sporting the same flowery shirt he wore in the 2006 pilot, is off to New Zealand with pathologist Laura Hobson (Clare Holman). He, Hathaway (Laurence Fox) and Maddox (Angela Griffin) have one more mystery to solve, however, which begins with, in a sadly appropriate way for these modern times, a bomb blast.
LABOUR DAY
My Restaurant in India (Choice TV, 5.30pm). Former MasterChef Australia contestant Sarah
Todd sets up, or at least tries to, a restaurant in Goa. For Shiva’s sake, why? A pop-up truck in St Kilda would have been easier. To be fair, it’s under the auspices of Delhi restaurateur Ashish Kapoor and it seems to have worked: the Antares Restaurant and Beach Club has 13 villas for hire and boasts a restaurant that seats 250.
Rome’s Invisible City (Choice
TV, 8.30pm). Never mind the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Vatican, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, the Arch of Constantine – ebullient comedian Alexander Armstrong and historian Michael Wood go underground to look at the networks that kept the city above running and organised. Aqueducts, sewers, catacombs, quarries, even temples with frescoes.
The Walking Dead (TVNZ 2, 9.30pm). Are you ready for round seven? Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more brutal, along comes Negan, played with relish by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He may have once melted our hearts as Dying Denny in Grey’s Anatomy, but now he’s the psychopathic leader of a group called the Saviors and he’s about to kill one of the core cast with his barbed-wire baseball bat, “Lucille”. After being the big, bad survivors, the Rick Grimes gang are going to have to deal with living in a fascist dictatorship – but there’s another new group on the horizon called the Kingdom, led by a guy with a pet tiger.
It’s getting a bit unrealistic now, don’t you think? Fan bonus: Talking Dead, the show hosted by The Nerdist’s Chris Hardwick, will screen on TVNZ OnDemand afterwards.
TUESDAY OCTOBER 25
The Great British Bake Off (Prime, 7.30pm). Scandal! The baked Alaska episode that saw meltdowns both literal and metaphorical and a rubbish
bin being presented for the final judging. It all kicked off when one of the contestants took another’s ice-cream and meringue creation out of the fridge, possibly causing it to melt. Worse, the aggrieved party then dumped his soggy pudding in the bin and stormed off to have a sulk. “More controversial than the great custard theft of 2013,” said one online commenter.
Aftermath (The Zone, Sky 009, 8.30pm). It seems it’s the week for daffy series: here’s some Canadian post-apocalyptic fun that throws in natural disasters, meteor strikes, demonic possession and cannibals. Hey, why not? James Tupper and Ann Heche – remember Men in Trees? – try to keep themselves and their three kids alive while travelling around this blighted landscape in an RV. Enjoy.
FRIDAY OCTOBER 28
Dogs That Changed the World (Choice TV, 4.00pm).
Aw, one for dog lovers that spans from the highlands of Scotland to the jungles of Papua New Guinea. This two-part documentary even answers the question of where did dogs come from, and there is a different theory from the ancient people tamed wolves idea. It also celebrates the domestic dog, but has something to say about the excessive breeding that has resulted in animals that wouldn’t last two seconds in the wild.
Who Do You Think You Are? US (BBC Knowledge, Sky 074, 8.30pm). A new season of the US iteration of the series will include Bryan Cranston, Molly Ringwald, Alfre Woodard, Katey Sagal, Chris Noth and Lea Michele. Cranston, the son of an actor, discovers a disturbing pattern of deadbeat dads in his paternal line, beginning with his own father, and learns of an Irish ancestor who emigrated to Canada.