The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
WHAT TO WATCH
Sky Atlantic, 9pm
MARE OF EASTTOWN
Kate Winslet returns to TV for the first time in a decade to star in this seven-part drama about a small-town cop in turmoil. It’s a genre path well-trodden by series from Fargo to The Sinner to Broadchurch, but this has a quality indie film vibe about it as well as Oscar-winner Winslet. She plays Mare Sheehan, a detective in a drab Philadelphia satellite town who’s been ground down by life and the job. She’s so far failed to find the killer of a local teenage girl a year ago and her home post-divorce features the energysapping combination of a difficult mother, adolescent daughter and grandson whose parents
MONEY FOR NOTHING BBC One, 3.45pm
The upcycling show that captures the make-doand-mend Zeitgeist returns for a 10th run. In Walsall, presenter Jacqui Joseph rescues a bamboo chair, sideboard and pair of bedside tables from a rubbish tip and enlists expert craftsmen to transform them into sellable goods.
ACKLEY BRIDGE Channel 4, 6pm
With its original cast having graduated from school, this spirited comedy drama reinvents itself with new faces and format. Airing nightly over two weeks in half-hour episodes, it’s got a sharper pace as are absent. Episode one sets out Mare’s stall, bedding her into this dingy neighbourhood in which she knows all the thieving junkies by name and where her exhusband is about to remarry. Soon, another murder will catalyse the unearthing of secrets: hers and the town’s.
Winslet is terrific as Mare, delivering a grounded portrait of a middle-aged woman soldiering on despite life’s knocks. The supporting characters are well drawn and the estimable Guy Pearce also brings a heft to the cast list as Mare’s potential love interest. This comes highly recommended. Vicki Power i
it introduces us to warring half-sisters
Kayla (Robyn Cara), who’s mixed race, and Marina (Carla Woodcock), the alpha mean girl.
THE BUILDINGS THAT FOUGHT HITLER Yesterday, 8pm
Set aside the silly title and history buffs will embrace this in-depth look at Britain’s Second World War defensive structures. Tonight, Rob Bell inspects edifices along the south’s unfortunately named “coastal crust” and a gun emplacement in Lincolnshire once hidden from bombers by its disguise as a sweet shop.