Television
The Best of the Week
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 18
Hockey (Sky Sport 4, Sky 054, 11.30am). A week of live coverage of the World League Final between the eight best women’s teams bullies off today from Auckland’s North Harbour Hockey Stadium.
The first game for the Black Sticks is against South Korea at 5.30pm; then they’ll face the US (Monday, 7.45pm) before hopefully moving on to the quarterfinals later in the week.
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 19
Rugby (Sky Sport 1, Sky 051, 5.45am). The All Blacks venture to Edinburgh’s Murrayfield to play Scotland, a team who have held New Zealand to a draw twice in their history (who can forget the 0-0 clash of 1964? Those were the days) and lost every other time. Och, but they tend to lose by less at home. Other rugger beaming in from the Northern Hemisphere includes an always-confident England versus a newly confident Australia (Sky Sport 2, Sky 052, 3.50am) from Twickenham.
The Brokenwood Mysteries (Prime, 8.30pm). The local softly-softly crime dramedy that our own Diana Wichtel labelled “so preposterous as to be quite good” heads into its third-season final, with the sleepy hamlet of Brokenwood suffering yet another homicide. This time it’s death by samurai sword for a finance company high-flyer who lost the life savings of many clients but was never punished for it. Suspicion falls on the town’s rest home, where many of the residents were ripped off in his shonky deals. If there’s a retired bankrupt samurai living there, case closed, really.
Peaky Blinders (UKTV, Sky 007, 8.30pm). The previous season of this stylised and gritty between-the-wars BBC crime family saga was patchy, but had a fine finale and some inspired soundtrack choices. For the penultimate season four, they’ve brought out the big guns in the cast as well as the props department. Among the newcomers is Irish actor Aidan Gillen, who arrives after his Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish’s demise in Game of Thrones. Gillen plays Aberama Gold, a “hard-nut gypsy” who aligns himself with Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), the Birmingham Mob boss who progressed from slumdweller to country manor in the previous seasons. Also arriving armed and dangerous