Television
The Best of the Week
SUNDAY MARCH 12
Walks with My Dog (Choice TV, 7.30pm). Possibly the most English thing ever: celebs take a ramble with their dogs around some lovely locations, meeting locals and other sundry experts. Walkers (the living kind) include
Bill Bailey, Julian Clary, Phil Spencer, Ben Fogle and Cerys Matthews.
Life After Chernobyl (Discovery, Sky 070, 7.30pm). An anthropologist and a biologist walk into an exclusion zone. It has the annoying big-voice narration, but is nevertheless an interesting look at what has happened after the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant 31 years ago. Mary-Ann Ochota and Rob Nelson see horses, wolves, wild boars and even people who are living within the low-radiation area of the zone. The pair enter the scarily contaminated Red
Forest (Geiger counter reading: Get Out! Get Out Now!), where dead trees are not decaying and spiders weave erratic webs.
MONDAY MARCH 13
American Crime (TVNZ OnDemand, 10.00pm).
TVNZ has bumped a few new programmes onto its streaming website, including the new season of this exceptional anthology drama series that mixes politics, morality and the vagaries of the justice system into highly charged storylines. As in Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story series, John Ridley (who wrote the screenplay for 12 Years a Slave) is using a core cast to tell different stories, notably Felicity Huffman, Regina King, Lili Taylor and Timothy Hutton. Grey’s Anatomy’s Sandra Oh is joining the new season, which, pertinently, is about the treatment of illegal Mexican workers.
Also available from this week: Trial & Error, a comedy starring John Lithgow as a poetry professor who may or may not have killed his wife (from 8.00pm on Thursday), and Queen Sugar, the drama series created by Ava DuVernay ( Selma) about a modern woman (Dawn-Lyen Gardner) who leaves Los Angeles to claim her inheritance, a sugar-cane farm in Louisiana (box set available from Friday). True Blood’s Rutina Wesley also stars.
Roman Britain from the Air (Choice TV, 8.30pm). The title is slightly misleading: historian Michael Scott visits the western wall of a Roman fort in an underground carpark in London and the remains of an amphitheatre underneath Guildhall Art Gallery. However, presenter Christine Bleakley whizzes about in a helicopter looking at remains that are best viewed from the air, in particular the amphitheatre at Caerleon in Wales and Hadrian’s Wall in the north.
Murder in the First (TVNZ 1, 10.55pm). Everything has a gimmick now ( Blindspot, we’re looking at you) and ordinary old procedural crime series seem to have been relegated to late nights. Here’s season three of the US series starring Taye Diggs ( Private Practice) and Kathleen Robertson ( Boss) as detectives in San Francisco. Rather than a gimmick, Murder in the First follows the anthology model; this season is about the murder of a football player, a PR nightmare that escalates when Diggs shoots a fleeing suspect who was unarmed.
TUESDAY MARCH 14
Molly (Prime, 8.35pm). Fairly Aussie-specific, admittedly, but this two-part biopic does depict a place and time that will never be seen again, on television anyway. Molly Meldrum became the face of the Australian music scene when he co-created Countdown in 1974, although at the beginning, it was seat-of-thepants stuff. He was frequently terrible and there was plenty of bad behaviour and nowlegendary fluffed interviews (including, famously, with Prince Charles, whom he addressed as “lovey” and touched on the knee). Simpler times, when stars weren’t so media trained and AC/DC’s Bon Scott could get away with attacking Angus Young with a rubber mallet while wearing a schoolgirl’s uniform and smoking a joint. There are plenty of ups and downs for Samuel Johnson ( The Secret Life of Us), who is brilliant as Molly, to get his teeth into.
WEDNESDAY MARCH 15
The Coroner (UKTV, Sky 007, 8.30pm). Another BBC daytime drama that is good enough to screen at night: add The Coroner to WPC 56 and Father Brown on the list of unpretentious, entertaining fare. Waking the Dead’s Claire Goose is a solicitor who returns to Lighthaven, her childhood home in Devon, the next county over from Dorset, where the far more serious Broadchurch is set. She brings with her a gothy teenage daughter and a heart broken by her childhood sweetheart, who is now, naturally, the local cop. The stage is now set for a murder mystery of the week and a spot of light romance, cleverly conceived by veteran soap writer Sally Abbott. The nearby Cornish coast supplies Goose’s mother, Beatie Edney – Poldark’s Prudie.
Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC Knowledge, Sky 074, 8.30pm). Wow, season 13 of the original British series. Searching celebrities include Sir Ian McKellen, Amanda Holden, Warwick Davis, Greg Davies and Ricky Tomlinson.
This Time Next Year (Three, 9.00pm). UK viewers were confused: “Does Davina McCall not age at all?” were common complaints on Twitter. The ITV series wheels in people aiming to transform their lives over the course of a year – lose weight, find love, overcome a stammer – and, through the magic of television, they exit an interview with McCall and immediately enter the studio transformed. The fact that McCall is wearing the same dress and appears utterly unchanged was baffling for some. “My brain sometimes struggled to compute that I was looking at the same people a year apart,” said the Radio Times critic.
FRIDAY MARCH 17
Great Songwriters (Sky Arts, Sky 020, 8.30pm). Musicians are always more engaged when they’re talking about their work, and this series is all about the creative process. Ryan Adams is shown
writing lyrics on a typewriter; Jimmy Webb sings Wichita Lineman; and Barry Gibb describes writing How Deep Is Your Love. “It’s a bit like a magic trick,” says Webb. “You create a problem for the audience to solve.”