NELL (1994)
Channel 4, 10pm
An offbeat drama about a semi-feral woman who speaks her own bizarre language after being raised in almost total isolation. Jodie Foster plays the eponymous wilderness dweller, who is eventually discovered by two kindly doctors (Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson). Adapted from Mark Handley’s stage play Idioglossia, Michael Apted’s fable makes some crude, adolescent point about the gulf between the purity of nature and the corruption of urban society. But it certainly looks beautiful, while Foster’s extraordinary performance earned her an Oscar nomination. (113min)
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THE THEORY OF FLIGHT (1998)
BBC Two, 11.20pm
A romantic drama on the bold theme of sex and the severely disabled, The Theory of Flight walks a perilous line between earnest hand-wringing and mawkish sentimentality. Helena Bonham Carter stars as Jane, who is confined to her wheelchair and barely able to move but is desperate to lose her virginity. Kenneth Branagh plays Richard, an artist whose community service punishment for causing a public nuisance involves keeping Jane company. The affair that develops between them is predictable but sweetly told, despite the pedestrian direction by Paul Greengrass. (101min)
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COMING HOME (1978)
BBC One, 12.20am
Picking up tonight’s theme of sex in wheelchairs, Coming Home was one of the first and most sensitively handled anti-war dramas about Vietnam. Jane Fonda plays a naive housewife who learns about the horrors of the war through Jon Voight’s character, an embittered veteran paralysed from the waist down. The gradual shift in their relationship from acquaintances to lovers is delicately portrayed, as is the devastating effect on Fonda’s military husband, played by Bruce Dern. (126 min)