Bellamy’s People
BBC Two, 10pm
Bellamy’s People is sensationally good. Reuniting Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson from The Fast Show and performed by a crack team of comic actors, the idea is that a self-satisfied young Radio 4 talkshow host, Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas), leaves his studio and goes walkabout to meet his listeners, who prove to be an astonishing variety of perfectly realised comic characters. They include a 23 stone (146 kg) man who never leaves his front room, an ageing rock impresario, a prim parish worker, an Asian community leader, a semi-reformed criminal and a couple of dotty aristocrats with a penchant for totalitarian regimes. Each character seems more accurate and colourful than the one before and the show relies entirely on observation rather than gags to generate its laughter.
My Dream Farm
Channel 4, 8pm
Advertisement
Back on television for the first time since he suffered a stroke nearly two years ago, Monty Don helps six families to try to realise their dreams of leaving the rat race and living off the land. The problem is that farming is as almost as precarious an existence as acting and in each case — with 40 years of farming experience behind him — his role is to inject a dose of hard-headed practicality into their bucolic idylls. The first family he helps has bought 34 acres of hill farm on Dartmoor. Although beautiful, it is not possible to make a living from sheep farming on such a small scale. Fortunately, they have one big idea — manufacturing top-quality duvets from their own wool — as well as the good sense and humility to heed his advice. It is a pleasant watch, without hype or melodrama.
The Slumdog Children of Mumbai
Channel 4, 9pm
This documentary is the uncompromising companion piece to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. It follows a handful of children as they eke out a desperate existence in the slums of Bombay. None of them enjoy anything that could be described as an innocent childhood. The lucky ones live in a one-room shelter with no water or sanitation. Others less fortunate live rough on the streets, where they are easy prey to drug dealers, gangs and sexual predators. They survive by selling flowers, begging, pickpocketing or stealing food from the market. Alcohol and substance abuse are rife, the drug of choice being paint thinner sucked off a rag. In one of the fastest-growing global economies, a child dies in the slums every 16 seconds.
Rab C Nesbitt
Advertisement
BBC Two, 9.30pm
Twenty years after he first appeared on BBC Two, Rab C Nesbitt is back for a new series. The grubby, unshaven Scottish philosopher in a string vest may have given up the drink, but he still simmers in a fug of aggression, sexual frustration and befuddled warmth. In the opening episode he picks up his son from the psychiatric ward and tries to engineer a meeting between father and daughter. It isn’t easy. The little girl, heavily influenced by her mother, takes time off from eating her ice cream to call her daddy “a two-timing man-whore who shacked up with a hard-faced bitch”. The dialect may at times be impenetrable, the content is often as filthy as his unwashed underpants and it isn’t always that funny, but Rab C Nesbitt has earned a unique place in TV comedy.