TELEVISION
Our Picks of the Week
SATURDAY MAY 13
MIRIAM MARGOLYES: AUSTRALIA UNMASKED
Going walkabout
Screening: Living, 7.30pm
Streaming: SkyGo
The unquestionably British Miriam Margolyes has been an Australian citizen since 2013 – she and her partner have a home in Robertson, in the southern highlands of New South Wales. And Margolyes has already done one gadabout the Lucky Country for the ABC, in the 2020 series Almost Australian, which is now showing on Netflix.
This recent one has her back in the campervan for three episodes. In the first, she’s pondering the history of Tasmania, then in subsequent instalments, it’s matters of class differences in Victoria as she swings between polo matches and bogan burnouts, before it’s off to South Australia to complete her study of what a “fair go” means in contemporary Oz.
THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF
Blighty bun fight
Screening: TVNZ 1, 7.00pm
Streaming: TVNZ+
Following the previous Saturday’s Great British takeover of prime time, here’s another and it’s followed by Jamie Oliver’s new series (see right).
It’s the 13th season of TGBBO and the final one for co-host Matt Lucas, who has quit after co-hosting three seasons with fellow comedian Noel Fielding.
The first episode is “cake week”, with the dozen amateur bakers attempting to impress judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Keith with their mini cakes and a larger one modelled on a favourite home, but, well, cake size. On Sunday (TVNZ 2, 6.00pm), it’s the turn of after-show The Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice,
with hosts Jo Brand and Tom Allen chewing over what happened in the previous night’s episode with guests including contestants who failed to rise to the occasion.
JAMIE OLIVER: COOKING FOR LESS
Cheap as chips
TVNZ 1, 8.25pm
Streaming: TVNZ+
In the UK, this show is called
Jamie’s £1 Wonders, which was based on a per-portion costing and invited an inevitable backlash about the size of the helpings, the price of ingredients and how much energy was required to cook his low-budget offerings. But the initial one-off episode that led to the series gave Oliver his highest ratings in years. So it would seem a miserly meal series hosted by a highnet-worth individual during a British cost-of-living crisis is an idea whose time has come and may translate quite well here. Even if it’s on after dinner – and straight after
The Great British Bake Off – on Saturday nights.
It’s not all Oliver and English stodge, either. Each episode features guest chefs with thrifty dishes from their home cuisines, which include Sri Lankan, Cypriot, Italian and Indian.
Thirty of the show’s recipes are available on Oliver’s website jamieoliver.com (requires account sign-up) and the show’s theme music is Food, Glorious Food from the wellknown poverty musical Oliver! Well, it would be if we were in charge.
THE GREAT
Huzzah!
Streaming: Neon/SkyGo
As all Russian history scholars, or just those with ready access to Wikipedia, know, The Great has always played fast and loose with the official record. And there’s something even more factually dubious about the new third season of the gleefully rude black comedy focusing on 18thcentury Empress Catherine. The second season ended with Catherine (Elle Fanning) failing to kill Peter III (Nicholas Hoult), and him witnessing her stabbing to death his royal stand-in.
In history, Peter III didn’t last long after Catherine deposed him from the throne. In the new season, it seems, judging from the trailer, the couple will be in marriage counselling for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, Catherine’s efforts to bring enlightenment to Russia are having some
unintended consequences among the peasantry. The freshly founded United States of America has sent its ambassador to St Petersburg with a few suggestions.
STILL: A MICHAEL J. FOX MOVIE
Doco Hollywood
Streaming: Apple TV+
Michael J Fox hasn’t headlined a film since The Frighteners,
the 1996 NZ-made ghost film directed by Peter Jackson. Two years later, he announced he had early-onset Parkinson’s disease, having first been diagnosed in 1991 at the age of 29.
Now he’s got one with his name in the title. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is a feature in which the now 61-yearold Fox talks about his life and debilitating illness, and tracks his unlikely career as a diminutive hyperactive Canadian teenager who became the breakout star of sitcom Family Ties in the 1980s. Simultaneously, he conquered the big screen as Marty McFly in the Back to the Future trilogy.
The documentary is by Davis Guggenheim ( An Inconvenient Truth, He Named Me Malala), who says his pitch to Fox was: “What happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease?”
WEDNESDAY MAY 17 HIGH DESERT
California scheming Streaming: Apple TV+
Since winning an Oscar for Boyhood, Patricia Arquette has been on a roll with copious award recognition for her performances in Escape at Dannemora, The Act and Severance. The dark comedy High Desert has her headlining as Peggy, an on-again, off-again addict living in a tumbleweed town in the Mojave Desert, east of Los Angeles.
After the death of her mother, and needing a job after being tossed out of the family home, she decides she will become a private detective. There are some hitches in her new career. Among them is her record from a drug bust of 10 years earlier and a husband (Matt Dillon) who is still in jail because of it. It’s created by the writing partnership of Nancy Fichman and Jennifer HoppeHouse ( Nurse Jackie, Grace and Frankie), and among its executive producers is Ben Stiller, who was in the same role on Dannemora and Severance. It stars his wife Christine Taylor as Peggy’s more sensible sister.
THURSDAY MAY 18 BRITAIN’S NOVEL LANDSCAPES
A bookish guide book
Screening: Sky Arts, 8.30pm
Streaming: SkyGo
Veteran presenter and former Guardian agony aunt Mariella Frostrup takes to the English countryside in this four-part series, examining how the times they lived in and their surroundings influenced the work of classic British women writers.
The first episode explores Jane Austen’s Hampshire, and how it may have influenced her novels, even though none were set there.
Frostrup goes as far as recreating an 18th-century ball in an effort to show how these events worked as match-makers. The following week, the programme heads west to Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall, then it’s off to Yorkshire for the
Brontës and the Lake District for Beatrix Potter.
FRIDAY MAY 19 BAD BEHAVIOUR
Mean Sheilas
Streaming: TVNZ+
Yet another tale of teenage girls going wild in the great outdoors, this Australian series is set in the “wilderness campus” of an exclusive boarding school where 15-year-olds spend a year living in dormitories with minimal supervision. It’s based on the 2015 memoir by Rebecca Starford, Bad Behaviour: A Memoir of Bullying and Boarding School, about her time at an elite Victorian college.
In this series, Jo McKenzie ( Jana McKinnon) bonds with another scholarship student Alice Kang (Yerin Ha), but her loyalties shift under the influence of Portia, the dorm’s manipulative and ruthless queen bee (Markella Kavenagh).
The show cuts between boarding-school adolescent power games, riven with sexual tension, and 10 years later, when McKenzie and Kang encounter each other as adults. The series has had inevitable Lord of the Flies
comparisons over the Tasman. Its cast includes New Zealand actress Erana James, last seen in the Amazon Prime allfemale desert island survival tale The Wilds. ▮