CRITIC’S CHOICE
Pick of the day
Winnie-The-Pooh — The Most Famous Bear In The World (C4, 6pm)
The bear of very little brain turned 90 this year, a fact that might have received more attention in Britain had the Queen not also marked that particular birthday. Alan Titchmarsh, having made himself a television expert on Her Majesty’s homes and gardens, here travels to Cotchford Farm, AA Milne’s former home in East Sussex, and the Hundred Acre Wood to discover why the successful playwright turned to writing children’s stories and penned four of the most influential books of the 20th century.
Along the way, he stops to play Poohsticks and meets Milne’s biographer, social historians and other authors in an attempt to understand the breadth and depth of Pooh’s legacy. Perhaps the last word, however, should be left to the bear himself: “The things that make me different are the things that make me.”
David Hutcheon
And in at No 1 ...
Britain’s Best Loved Sitcoms (C4, 7pm)
The broadcaster may have been weaned off the list-programme diet, but there is little better than an old-fashioned chart rundown at this time of the year. Tamsin Greig is our host as “the nation’s most revered” sitcom is revealed and others from the past half century — what, no Hancock’s Half Hour? — are remembered.
Lost no longer
Peter Cook & Dudley Moore — The Missing Sketches (C4, 8pm)
In 1964, the duo appeared in a new series originally called Not Only .. But Also .. — a holy grail for lovers of comedies the BBC later wiped from the archives. Here is what remains of nine skits thought lost but recently rediscovered in an Australian basement. “It’s offensively homophobic, of course,” says Barry Humphries of one sketch in which he took part.
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Radio pick of the day
Archive On 4: Old Year’s Night (R4 Extra, 8am/3pm)
James Naughtie swirls his kilt and checks his sporran — metaphorically, of course — to explore the meaning of his native land’s Hogmanay, the greatest of its winter festivities (from 2003). Nick Utechin, in 2008’s Sherlock Holmes: The Game’s Afoot (R4 Extra, 9am/7pm), picks some of his favourite radio versions of the stories over the decades. The new year is seen in by glitz, disco classics and vintage jazz on Ana Matronic (R2, 11pm) and by dancefloor fillers and Coldcut (6 Music, 11pm).
Paul Donovan
FILM CHOICE
Pulp Fiction (1994)
(C5, 10.30pm)
Perhaps out of deference to a movie-maker whose early trademarks included shaking up his plots’ sequences of events, Channel 5 is showing this evening’s Quentin Tarantino double bill in reverse order. Reservoir Dogs (1.20am), the 1992 thriller in which the director first displayed his explosive, super-stylised way with hard-boiled tales, is preceded by this concoction of crime stories, in which he took that method to a new level of audacity.
The 33 (2015)
(Sky Cinema Premiere, 8.45am/5.45pm)
Telling the story of the 33 miners trapped for months in a gold-and-copper mine in Chile in 2010, Patricia Riggen’s English-speaking film has the emphatic style of a fictional disaster movie. In a made-up story, though, the miners would probably be active escapers. Here (led by Antonio Banderas) they have little to do except give one another rousing speeches.
Edward Porter
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