Television
The Best of the Week
SUNDAY JANUARY 7
Dippy and the Whale (Choice TV, 7.30pm). A one-off documentary filmed over two years as the iconic dinosaur skeleton in London’s Natural History Museum, nicknamed Dippy, was replaced by the skeleton of a blue whale. Quite a feat, as the whale must be suspended in Hintze Hall, the grand space that first greets visitors. Nearly all the bones of the blue whale are real, rather than replica (the museum bought them in 1891 for £250). The 25m skeleton is also seen as a symbol of conservation, as the blue whale was on the brink of extinction in the 1960s until a global decision was made to stop hunting it. The doco is, of course, narrated by Sir David Attenborough and Choice TV is also screening
another one-off Attenborough documentary this week, Attenborough’s
Ark (Monday, 6.30pm), in which he picks 10 of the most important, although lesserknown, animals he would like to save from extinction. But wait, there’s more Attenborough: Life (Three, Sunday 5.00pm) concludes with a primates episode.
MONDAY JANUARY 8
75th Golden Globe Awards (Vibe, Sky 006, 2.00pm). Already? It seems too early in the year for a Hollywood awards ceremony. Seth Meyers presents from the Beverly Hilton and this year’s Cecil B DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award honoree is Oprah Winfrey. Guillermo del Toro’s new film The Shape of Water tops the movie list with seven nominations, and Steven Spielberg’s The Post, which depicts Washington Post journalists who published the Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s, has six. The Golden Globes honour television, too:
Big Little Lies has the most nominations, followed by Feud: Bette and Joan, Fargo,
The Handmaid’s Tale and This Is Us. The ceremony is live from 2.00pm, with highlights at 8.30pm. The E! channel has red-carpet coverage from 10.00am, where the only contest that matters is the battle of the frocks.
The Celebrity Chase (TVNZ 1, 7.30pm, also Tuesday). Apparently, we like UK quiz show The Chase so much the celebrity version has been
deemed worthy of a nighttime slot. The celebs play for charity, of course, against awesome “chasers” Mark “the Beast” Labbet, Shaun “the
Dark Destroyer” Wallace, Anne “the Governess” Hegerty, Paul “the Sinhaman” Sinha and Jenny “Vixen” Ryan. The big question is how will Bradley Walsh juggle presenting The Chase and his new job as Doctor Who’s companion?
Family Food Fight (TVNZ 2, 7.30pm, also Tuesday and Wednesday). Welcome to the new My Kitchen Rules/ MasterChef, although this new Aussie series has a touch of royalty, or at least royaltyadjacency, in the form of guest judge Tom Parker Bowles, a food writer and critic and the son of Camilla. Restaurateur Matt Moran, pastry chef
Anna Polyviou and cookbook author Hayden Quinn are the other judges who oversee six competing families.
TUESDAY JANUARY 9
The Blacklist (Three, 10.55pm). The Blacklist returns with a reset: it’s a couple of months since Liz awoke from a coma and she is trying to move on without Tom, who was killed in the mid-season finale. But just when she thought she was out …
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 10
Wake in Fright (TVNZ OnDemand). A new adaptation of the classic Australian novel by Kenneth Cook that was so viscerally adapted for film in 1971. Sean Keenan is the young schoolteacher about to make the worst stopover of his life when his car is damaged and he washes up in an isolated mining town. The story of hard drinking and illegal gambling has been updated to include drug-dealing (and the kangaroo shoot of the original film becomes a pig hunt), but the feral desperation of the isolated outback remains.
The two-part mini-series also stars David Wenham, Alex Dimitriades, Gary Sweet and our own Robyn Malcolm.
Guy Martin’s Spitfire (Choice TV, 7.30pm). Guy Martin, mechanic, motorbike racer and wearer of extraordinary sideburns, gets stuck into the restoration of a Spitfire Mark I that was dug out of a French beach in 1980. He follows the team at the Imperial War Museum Duxford over two years as they work on the Spitfire and tells the story of its pilot, Geoffrey Stephenson. It’s a tale of derring-do: Stephenson crash-landed in France, was captured by the Nazis and, after many escape attempts, was sent to Colditz, where he was one of the POWs who designed and built a glider in secret.
“This plane stands for so much in British history, but for me as a mechanic it’s interesting because it’s so technologically advanced, despite having been designed in the late 1930s,” Martin told the Express.
Tokyo Project (SoHo, Sky 010, 9.30pm). Lena Dunham gets the Girls team back together for this short film, which first screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. Dunham and Girls’
showrunner
Jenni
Konner are the team behind
director Richard Shepard’s story about two Americans in Tokyo. Elisabeth Moss and Ebon Moss-Bachrach ( Girls’ annoying musician Desi) are the expats having a Lost in Translation moment. Shepard, who also wrote the short film, directed 12 episodes of Girls, including the excoriating American Bitch.
THURSDAY JANUARY 11
The History of Comedy (TVNZ 1, 8.45pm). Correction: the history of American comedy, as this is a CNN series and therefore focuses on US archive material, comedians and scholars. Still, it’s also a document of changing times and mores, with episodes about inappropriate humour and censorship, female comedians, racial humour and topical comedy. Among the interviewees are Norman Lear, Carol Burnett, Larry David, Betty White, Samantha Bee, Patton Oswalt, Keegan-Michael Key and Margaret Cho.
FRIDAY JANUARY 12
OJ: Guilty in Vegas (Crime + Investigation, Sky 071, 9.30pm). The OJ Simpson court case in 1995 may have been known as the trial of the century, but it wasn’t the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman that sent him to prison. This twohour special tells the story of his arrest in Las Vegas in 2007 on robbery, kidnapping and arms charges. In the US, the doco was timed for Simpson’s release from a Nevada correctional centre in October and features interviews with police officers and legal officials, as well as interrogation audio and voicemails.