The very best of the week ahead
Today
Stanley Baxter’s Best Bits… and More
CHANNEL 5, 9.00PM
It may come as a surprise that the once popular Scottish comedian, who bestrode the airwaves in the 1970s and 1980s and regularly drew audiences of 12million or more is, at 93, still hale and hearty enough to present this loving trip down memory lane. He’s joined by a throng of colleagues and admirers – among them Rory Bremner, Barry Cryer and Miriam Margolyes – to recall the Glaswegian origins of his idiosyncratic brand of surprisingly (in retrospect) lewd comedy in which he caricatured the rich and famous, ancient and modern, regardless of gender. Indeed, there are many memorable clips of him playing everyone from the Queen to Antony and Cleopatra, Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois, plus the entire cast of
Upstairs, Downstairs and the glittering Busby Berkeley-style musical numbers in which he invariably played the feather-clad female lead. He emerges as a man of enormous comic skills, who wasn’t so much ahead of his time as slightly behind it – much of his act seeming to stem from the vaudeville tradition – and whose achievements often go overlooked. Gerard O’Donovan
Gauguin – A Dangerous Life
BBC FOUR, 9.00PM
This insightful documentary portrait of the impressionist painter Paul Gauguin coincides with the current exhibition of his portraits at the National Gallery in London. Shot in Paris, Brittany, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands and Aotearoa, it is, essentially, a portrait of a man torn between civilisation and his own, often self-deluding, need to get away from it towards something less confining, or more “savage” as he put it. GO
Monday y
Growing Up Poor: oor: Britain’s Breadline line Kids
CHANNEL 4, 10.00PM
Dispatches has been on a roll of late with a series of hard-hitting films that refuse to flinch from the often brutal realities of life in this country. This one, which lets children living in poverty speak for themselves about its impact on their lives, is harrowing and heartbreaking. In Morecambe Bay we meet bubbly nine-year-old Rose, who dreams of being an actress (“though I’m probably not any good”) and whose family have slid into poverty after struggling to pay for Rose’s sister’s funeral costs. In Sudbury, Suffolk, 15-year-old Danielle struggles to revise for her GCSEs in chaotic circumstances while talking movingly about her suicidal thoughts. The show’s star, however, is eight-year-old Courtney, who lives with her mother and brother in Cambridge. Whether singing a song about her peers missing her after being told of o a possible move to Hull, giggling gigg with her friends about ab north versus south, or announcing solemnly: solemnly “I can’t always get what I want to eat because mum doesn’t have that th type of money”, Courtney Courtne effortlessly holds the th screen. Her story – –a and the frank, humour-filled humour- way in which she sh tells it – is enough to t shame even the most shameless sha person.
Sarah Hughes Hu
The Prince and the Epstein Scandal – Panorama
BBC ONE, 9.00PM; NOT SCOTLAND
Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claims she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and forced to have sex with the Duke of York (which he denies), gives her first UK interview. SH
Tuesday The Family Secret
CHANNEL 4, 9.00PM
Regular Emmy and Bafta-winning production company True Vision ( China’s Stolen Children, Poor Kids, Catching a Killer) have made what sounds like another awards contender in this intriguingly conceived one-off documentary. The Family Secret brings cameras into a restorative justice conference between a woman who has spoken out about the rape and sexual abuse she suffered as a child over 20 years ago, and the perpetrator – a close relative of the woman. The conference itself runs for the hour, interspersed with insights from the victim and her family; with no editorial voice. The viewer must make up their own mind.
In theory, the victim gets to ask questions to try to attain something like closure, while the abuser is forced to reckon with the impact of their actions, and demonstrate remorse. Expect a story of the different ways in which the same event can be recalled, as well as a harrowing portrait of a family dealing with the guilt, shame, anger and stigmas around the shocking revelations. Gabriel Tate
BBC FOUR, 9.00PM
Photographer Cheryl Alexander presents this gripping film examining why Takaya, a wolf and thus normally a highly social animal, would appear on its own off the coast of Canada. GT
Wednesday My Grandparents’ War
CHANNEL 4, 9.00PM
Tonight’s subject, in this four-part series which sees four actors explore their grandparents’ wartime experiences, is Oscar-winner Mark Rylance, who stresses from the start that he has long been an activist for peace. This statement assumes particular importance as he looks back over the life of his grandfather, Osmond Skinner, “the most important male role model in my life, next to my father”. The gentle Skinner, a man who dreamt of planting an orchard after his war was over and who clearly adored his seven grandchildren, was a Japanese prisoner of war, and the story of how he survived is carefully told using a mixture of letters, public records and the testimony of other survivors. The result is a balanced, emotional film and one which refuses to shy away from depicting the brutal realities of war. SH
Britain’s Great Pension Crisis with Michael Buerk
CHANNEL 5, 9.15PM
For far too many of us, the idea of a pension is little more than a pipe dream, with 15million British people saving nothing for the future. Even the savers may not be putting enough aside. Michael Buerk’s investigation looks at ways to effect change. SH
Thursday Giri/Haji
BBC TWO, 9.00PM
One of the year’s most intriguing, complex and, at times, delightfully bonkers dramas comes to a close with an episode that once again displays a level of inventiveness rare in TV drama – even to the point of chucking a touching rooftop ballet sequence into its stylised Mexican-standoff climax. Writer Joe Barton throws everything at his gripping finale as, following last week’s arrival of Yakuza gangsters in London to bring back the renegade Yuto (Yosuke Kubosuka), Taki (Aoi Okuyama) becomes the pawn that knocks his plans to return to Tokyo off the rails. At the same time, Yuto’s policeman brother Kenzo (Takehiro Hira) is confronted by vengeful London mobster Abbot (Charlie Creed-Miles). Bringing all the story’s threads and characters together into a cohesive (mostly), entertaining and satisfying conclusion is no mean feat. But to instil so much emotion – via the superb cast – into a storyline that never sought to abandon its more cartoonish elements is an impressive achievement. GO
Yorkshire Walks
BBC FOUR, 7.30PM
Shanaz Gulzar concludes her four short solo walks with a five-mile trek from Bolton Abbey to the high point of Simon’s Seat, the evocatively named Valley of Desolation. GO
Friday The Marvelous Mrs Maisel
AMAZON PRIME VIDEO, FROM TODAY
Amazon’s delightful 1950s comedydrama, about a housewife who turns to stand-up when her marriage breaks down, returns for a third series trailing a raft of well-deserved awards in its wake. Last season cemented the show as a triumph; it was pastel-hued escapism for sure, but it never let its snappy script and whirlwind energy get the better of its deeply felt characters and thoughtful plot development. At the series’s heart is Rachel Brosnahan’s superb performance as the irrepressible Midge, who, when we left her last, had made the painful choice to leave her family and pursue her comedy career. Now we see the repercussions, as she heads off on an eye-opening tour across America with gloriously brash manager Susie (Alex Borstein) at her side. Toby Dantzic
Country Music By Ken Burns
BBC FOUR, 9.30PM & 10.20PM
Ken Burns’s lavish look at the origins of country music continues with this impressively detailed double-bill. We start off in the mid-1960s, when the Grand Ole Opry saw an influx of eclectic acts including Loretta Lynn, Charley Pride and Johnny Cash. The second episode takes us into the 1970s, where Bob Dylan and the Byrds found a recording home in Nashville. TD