TELEVISION
The Best of the Week
SATURDAY APRIL 24
CALL THE MIDWIFE (TVNZ 1, 8.50pm). The 10th season of the hardy period drama of nuns and nurses in London’s East End arrives after the pandemic affected its filming and reduced its episodes from eight to seven. Convent Nonnatus House is still under threat of demolition after getting a one-year stay of execution. If that sounds like the cue for this being the last season, it’s already been commissioned for an 11th to screen in 2022. The new season is set in 1966, the year England won the World Cup, an event that series creator Heidi Thomas has hinted will feature in the storyline. It was also the year a teenage Jenny Agutter started to make her mark in British movies in a career that eventually led to the role of Sister Julienne in this.
MONDAY APRIL 26
93RD ACADEMY AWARDS (TVNZ 2, noon; TVNZ Duke, 8.30pm). Mank, the David Fincher film starring Gary Oldman as the man who wrote
Citizen Kane, may have the most nominations. And it is one of those films that Oscar voters like more than anything – movies about making movies. But judging by the lead-up of other awards, not many of the film’s 10 nominations are likely to turn into wins. There’s just too much competition from the likes of
Nomadland (the frontrunner for Best Picture), The Father, Judas and the Black Messiah
and Promising Young Woman.
This year’s Oscars aren’t doing the Zoom acceptance speech thing but are being broadcast from two Los Angeles venues and a satellite venue in London. As with last year, there is no main host.
TUESDAY APRIL 27
MICHAEL PALIN: TRAVELS OF A LIFETIME (Prime, 7.30pm).
Starting with Around the World in 80 Days in 1989, Michael Palin began an accidental career of telly travel guy. The former Monty Python comedian was the BBC’s fourth choice to front that first show after Alan Whicker and others said no. Palin proved rather good at it. As someone says early in this retrospective, “Michael Palin set the tone for all travel TV today.” He’s made nine series and usually bashed out an accompanying book. His journeys began epic – after that first circumnavigation of the globe, he went north to south in Pole to Pole, then did a lap of the Pacific in Full Circle
– before focusing on regions and countries. All those early adventures, ending with 2004’s Himalaya, are revisited in Travels of a Lifetime, a sixepisode series in which Palin rattles around in his study while looking back on the good old days of having a heavily stamped passport.
DAVID LOMAS INVESTIGATES
(Three, 7.30pm). That great unraveller of family mysteries and finder of misplaced relations, David Lomas
returns with a second season of Investigates, which follows his earlier Lost and Found and Missing Pieces series. In the first episode, he’s helping 39-year-old Paula, who was conceived by donor insemination and is desperate to find her biological father who was, at the time, guaranteed anonymity. New Zealand legislated against sperm-donation records remaining confidential in 2004.
EAT WELL FOR LESS NZ (TVNZ 1, 7.30pm). Given their hospitality backgrounds and what’s been happening in the restaurant business, you