Tuesday television & radio
MasterChef
8pm, BBC One
The eight semi-finalists are split into teams to cater the MasterChef 20th anniversary celebration dinner at the Fishmonger’s Hall in London as John Torode oversees service. The winning team will secure themselves a place in the next semi-final, while the losers face a second challenge that sees them cooking a dish based on an ingredient they personally dislike. Sadistic.
Changing Ends
8.30pm, ITV1
“Sickies never lived up to their reputation,” opines Alan Carr, as his younger self (the brilliant Oliver Savell) throws one to avoid going to school and receiving a polio jab. It all leads to an awkward bonding session with his dad, Graham (Shaun Dooley), who would rather be reading the Racing Post than babysitting his supposedly ill son.
Better Off Dead?
9pm, BBC One
Actress and disability rights activist Liz Carr (Silent Witness) explores assisted suicide and explains why she believes it should not be legalised in the UK. She travels to Canada, where it is legal to offer medically assisted death to the terminally ill and the disabled, asking whether, in a world where disabled people are often told they’re “better off dead”, more power should be given to ending their lives. Back in the UK, she meets influential voices calling for a change in the law, such as Labour peer Lord Falconer and columnist Melanie Reid.
The Gathering
9pm, Channel 4
Merseyside crime dramas are having a moment – BBC One’s
The Responder is now joined by this thriller series. It begins with a teenage girl having her head pushed underwater at an illegal rave on a beach on the Dee Estuary, before reeling back to a month earlier. The victim is promising athlete Kelly (Eva Morgan), who straddles both the worlds of elite gymnastics, where she is on the pathway to Team GB, and a gang of unruly urban free-runners. In the opening episode, the rivalry between Kelly and fellow gymnast Jessica turns toxic when Kelly is selected for the national squad.
Praying for Armageddon – Storyville
10pm, BBC Four
A chilling documentary about the pastors and politicians agitating for the apocalypse – tracing the evangelical right in the US and their relations with Israel, the site of an apparently imminent Doomsday. These Christian fundamentalists believe in the literal truth of the book of Revelations, which identifies a large plain in the north of Israel
as the site of Armageddon, and actively pray for the Biblical end of days.
Tokyo Vice
10.40pm, BBC One
A sequel series for this pungent crime drama set in 90s Tokyo and loosely inspired by Jake Adelstein, the fluent Japanese-speaking American journalist who became the first US crime reporter on a prestigious Japanese newspaper. The action resumes where it left off, with Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) investigating the murder of Rachel’s friend and fellow “hostess” Polina –the vice minister for foreign affairs being implicated in a videotape of the killing.
Gerard Gilbert
Game Night
8pm, Sky Cinema Comedy
(John Francis Daley,
Jonathan Goldstein, 2018)
Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams are fun company in this action-comedy caper about a suburban couple who don’t realise that the kidnapping plot in which they get entangled is not, in fact, merely a role-playing game. Imagine David Fincher’s film The Game in the style of The Man who Knew Too Little.
The Lincoln Lawyer
11.20pm, Film4
(Brad Furman, 2011)
Matthew McConaughey stars in this legal thriller, adapted from a novel by Michael Connelly, about the quandary facing a defence attorney whose Beverly Hills playboy client (played by Ryan Phillippe) rather protests his innocence too much.
Videodrome
12.20am Sky Cinema Cult Classics (David Cronenberg, 1982)
This unnerving metaphilosophical horror film was very prescient about the relationships we were going to have with technology and the media, even if its motif of James Woods’ sleazy cable TV producer physically inserting a Betamax videocassette into his body now seems as quaint as the latex special effects. Debbie Harry co-stars.
Laurence Phelan