CRITICS’CHOICE
Pick of the day
The Return Of Flying Scotsman (BBC4, 8.30pm)
On February 25, 10 years of meticulous work reached its final stage as the restored Flying Scotsman made its inaugural run from London King’s Cross to its base at the National Rail Museum in York. As this misty-eyed film shows, it was an event that caused excitement along the nation’s railway lines as steam-train enthusiasts crowded onto station platforms to glimpse the 93-year-old locomotive in action.
A sense of joy shines out from this record of the journey, whether it comes from spectators politely waiting to secure a prized souvenir of coal from the tender, or the signwriters who painstakingly repainted the livery. To some, it might look like pointless nostalgia for a “golden age” at a time when rail ticket prices are high and travel expectations low; there is, however, something remarkable about the love an old machine can generate, a power as mysterious as the clouds of hissing steam.
Victoria Segal
The lure of the land
This Farming Life (BBC2, 7pm)
This elegant new 12-part series will be shown three times a week for the next month, and charts the seasons across five farms in Scotland. Sandy Granville, a former barrister from London, prepares for “the pit of winter” on the Isle of Lewis by bringing in a flock of wild sheep from an uninhabited island. The story of Sandy and his wife, Ali, is the most interesting — returning to the land of his grandfather — but the other families are perhaps more representative of the modern business of farming.
Refugee realities
Frontline Doctors — Winter Migrant Crisis (BBC1, 9pm)
This documentary defies viewers to watch without shaking their heads in dismay at what doctors Chris and Xand van Tulleken find when they travel across Europe to observe the conditions in which refugees are living. During one January morning on Lesbos, they helped some of the thousand people landing that day, brought cheap, dangerous boats ashore and met fellow professionals who —in the absence of organised support from the Greek government — offer immediate treatment for hypothermia and frostbite. The Jungle at Calais is shocking, but a shanty camp near Dunkirk beggars belief, and the van Tullekens are concerned that an ill one-year-old with measles could start an epidemic.
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Hitting the right notes
Vinyl (Sky Atlantic, 9pm)
This episode of Martin Scorsese’s music-industry fantasia starts with Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) smashing a sofa with a tennis racket during a marriage counselling session. It works well as a metaphor for the subtlety and finesse exhibited by this show, a migrainous whirl of artificial fibres, flashing lights and smart-stupid dialogue. Unconvincing punks the Nasty Bits continue to provide entertainment, forming a surprising alliance with a new manager, but they are easily outglammed by a Sly Stone-like funk star, Hannibal (Daniel J Watts), when he visits the American Century offices.
Not so enigmatic?
The Renaissance Unchained (BBC4, 9pm)
Waldemar Januszczak’s wonderfully unhinged series concludes by demonstrating the lack of reason present in the first modern age of reason. Looking at the dark side of Leonardo da Vinci, the Sunday Times critic says provocatively: “He was very clever and all that, but he was also driven, unsettling, imbalanced.” To the Louvre, then, for a close look at the Tolkeinesque hills behind the Mona Lisa, which Januszczak says amplify her enduring mystery; and The Virgin of the Rocks, where the figures point in a manner still not wholly understood by art historians.
Rich pickings
Vet On The Hill (More 4, 9pm)
This upgrade on Small Animal Hospital opens with a bizarrely flawed attempt at creating tension and jeopardy: “What do you get if you take a young Aussie vet from the beaches of Queensland to the Royal Borough of Richmond?” It’s not the wildest culture clash known to man, and Dr Scott Miller is hardly kicking about in a pair of surf shorts with a board under one arm; he does, however, have a peculiarly sunny disposition, an attribute that stands him in good stead as he deals with the affluent neighbourhood’s pets, including a cat that belongs to Ronnie Wood’s son, Jesse.
Victoria Segal and Helen Stewart
Sport choice
Cycling (Eurosport, 2.15pm)
FIA World Rally Championship (C5, 7pm)
Premiership Rugby (ITV4, 7pm)
La Liga (Sky Sports 1, 7.25pm)
Netball Superleague (Sky Sports 3, 7.30pm) Hertfordshire Mavericks v Celtic Dragons
Radio pick of the day
Book Of The Week: Seamus Heaney’s Aeneid Book VI (R4 FM, 9.45am/12.30am)
Do not miss Ian McKellen’s reading of the late Irish poet’s final work: a translation of the part of Virgil’s great epic, The Aeneid, in which the Trojan hero descends to the underworld (see Radio Waves). John Julius Norwich profiles five colourful pontiffs in The Popes (R4 Extra, 2.45pm), including one who had eight children, and the only Englishman, Nicholas Breakspear, in 1154. From Tennessee comes the country-music star Loretta Lynn: In Conversation (R2, 10pm).
Paul Donovan
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You say
Before the first episode of the new series of Happy Valley (BBC1) was even broadcast I confidently predicted that all the male characters would be portrayed as either weak or evil, the female characters as either heroic or long-suffering and all the marriages as dysfunctional. Whilst Sally Wainwright is undoubtedly a talented writer, it seems sad that she is unable to build women up without dragging men down.
Michael Bennett
Welcome back, Sarah Lancashire, from Last Tango to Happy Valley — never a duff performance.
Kevin Platt
Is the BBC running a school of mumbling to demonstrate street cred? I previously heard and understood everything Sarah Lancashire said, this time I was looking for subtitles.
Peter Smith-Cullen
Send your comments to: telly@sunday-times.co.uk
FILM CHOICE
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The Wild Bunch (1969)
Sky Movies Select, 12.05am
Unashamedly mythologising the doomed last stand of a band of ageing desperadoes (led by William Holden), Sam Peckinpah’s bloody masterpiece features some heavy-handed symbolic contrasts between Old West and new industrialised warfare, but its shoot-outs are poetry in slow motion.
Die Hard (1988)
Sky Movies Greats, 5.45pm
Bruce Willis became a card-carrying action hero in John McTiernan’s thundering thriller, playing a lone cop — part working-class everybloke, part indestructible Terminator — who tackles hostage-taking terrorists. The film’s pyrotechnical mayhem has been much imitated, yet rarely surpassed.
Independence Day (1996)
Film 4, 6.15pm
Roland Emmerich turns a 1950s sci-fi B-movie plot into a glorified arcade game, in which extraterrestrials zap the world to the brink of destruction. As befits super-sized popcorn enjoyment, the Oscar-winning special effects opt for quantity not quality, meaning once you’ve seen one alien death ray, you’ve seen them all.
Point Blank (1967)
TCM, 10.45pm
Lee Marvin is ferocious as a hood cutting a swathe through a crime outfit to exact revenge on a treacherous partner. It is no accident the granite-like face, dead eyes and steely-coloured hair mirror his character’s soulless quest, or that John Boorman’s thriller is at the pinnacle of modernist cinema.
Previews by Trevor Lewis