What to watch on Sky and free-to-air TV this week
Bathurst is finally back, Ben Fogle travels to Chernobyl and Ridley Scott’s latest epic makes its Sky Movies debut, writes
Alex Behan.
The 2600 square kilometres inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is such a unique example of nature healing, David Attenborough used it to bookend his biographical film A Life On Our Planet. Estimates vary about when it will truly be safe again. Some say 20,000 years, others think a mere 3000. For a deeper look Inside Chernobyl (Sunday, 8.30pm, TVNZ 1), Ben Fogle spends a week within the restricted area meeting locals, unwisely running his Geiger counter over abandoned pieces of machinery and poking about the ghost town of Pripyat.
The Last Duel (Sunday, 8.30pm, Sky Movies Premiere) is a medieval he-said/she-said, which dramatises the last-ever officially sanctioned duel in
France’s history which, of course, was two men fighting over a woman. Oscar-winning screenwriters Matt Damon and Ben Affleck team up with Nicole Holofcener (Friends With Money) to present three perspectives to this tale of gothic gaslighting. As well as Damon and Affleck, it also stars Jodie Comer and Adam Driver.
Did you know sperm whales invented the power nap? With the shortest sleep cycle of any mammal, they tend to grab just 15 minutes shut-eye, before getting back to the hunt. Nine-hundred kilograms of squid a day isn’t going to catch itself. In
Chasing Ocean Giants (tonight, 9.30pm, Animal Planet), award-winning filmmaker Patrick Dykstra looks for large, elusive underwater creatures and uses cuttingedge technology to get incredible footage for this eight-part series. A chance to hang out with Arctic Bowheads near Russia, humpbacks in Colombia and sperm whales hunting deep off the coast of Dominica.
Mount Panorama is Mecca for Aussie petrolheads. Each year, fans of fast cars flock to the small New South Wales town of Bathurst and after last year’s cancellation due to Covid, the speed fiends are
frothing. Superfans will have caught every moment, but for casual viewers Supercars Championship Bathurst 1000 (Sunday, 1.30pm, Three) condenses the 161 laps of the grand final into a convenient, free-to-air, Sunday lunch hour.
How did a piece of art that sold for US$1175 in 2005, become the most expensive painting ever sold? Is it really a lost Da Vinci, or one of the greatest scams in art history? After mysteriously ‘‘reappearing’’, the Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) sold for US$450 million in 2017, but not everyone (hardly anyone) agrees on its authenticity. Described by The Economist as ‘‘more like a thriller, than a documentary’’, The Saviour For Sale (tonight, 8pm, Sky Arts) delves into the insanity that is the art world, looks at its questionable valuation methodology and the shady deals that drive demand.
For some light, feel-good escapism The Wonderful World of Goats (Monday, December 6, 8.30pm, Country TV) looks like a lovely way to spend an hour. Cute kids leading even cuter kids down the catwalk vying for top prize in the competitive Dairy Goat category at Canada’s Royal Agricultural Fair.
Less likely to make you feel warm and fuzzy and more likely to make you feel guilty and queasy, What Are We Feeding Our Kids (Friday, 9.30pm, BBC Earth) looks at how much our diets have changed even since the 1980s. A tough truth to swallow is that child obesity has risen tenfold in 50 years and what we eat is the bulk of the problem. Turning himself into a human guinea pig, Dr Chris van Tulleken undertakes a gruelling self-experiment by switching to a diet of highly processed foods for 30 days – with confronting results.