Critics’ choice
All kinds of blues
Arena (BBC4, 10pm)
American Epic’s concluding film is bookended by the stories of two musicians with contrasting careers. On one hand, Joseph Kekuku, the Hawaiian inventor of the steel guitar, toured America and Europe in the early 20th century and had a rich posthumous legacy — once electrified, his invention was taken up by country, blues and rock performers. On the other, the now-revered bluesman Mississippi John Hurt was unrecorded and forgotten from the Depression to the folk revival — the same mid-century decades when the Hawaiian craze peaked — but was rediscovered three years before his death in 1966.
Sandwiched between is a section on the first Cajun musicians to be recorded — the three Breaux brothers, their sister Cléoma and her husband, Joe Falcon — who, like Kekuku and Hurt, are affectionately remembered by family members. American Epic — The Sessions (current stars’ tribute to the series’s pioneers) follows on Friday.
John Dugdale
The Life Swap Adventure (BBC2, 8pm)
Swappy days are here again as BBC2’s series does its best to revive the noughties fad for home-exchange formats. And this episode is particularly close to Wife Swap as it features two married women: Leslie, who co-runs a B&B in Alaska and craves adventures, changes places with Lillian, pictured, a nurse and soldier’s wife in Nottingham who wants to settle down after years of moving from base to base. (JD)
The Handmaid’s Tale (C4, 9pm)
The opening scenes of the second episode require a strong stomach as another ceremony takes place, every bit as horrifying as the last. Elisabeth Moss as Offred is magnificent, her face betraying nothing but determination to survive while her character’s internal voice expresses her loathing of her situation, but the show is ill-served by jarring commercial breaks. (Helen Stewart)
Mercy Street (Drama, 8pm)
Ridley Scott’s lacklustre Civil War medical soap keeps its soft focus firmly on the lives and loves of the nurses rather than the politics that brought the medium-wattage cast to the field hospital, the one bright light being the veteran English actress Suzanne Bertish as Matron Brannan, who does her best to make a weak script interesting. Don’t get too involved — the show has already been cancelled in America after two series. (HS)
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Paul Hollywood’s Big Continental Road Trip (BBC2, 9pm)
Hollywood is in Germany for his second trip, which takes in classic Porsche, Mercedes and BMW models, East German cars, autobahns, the VW factory and a £30m car wash. But the highlight for him is hurtling around the Nürburgring race track with Al Murray — who theorises about the difference between German and British drivers — as his passenger. (JD)
Film choice
Lights Out (2016)
Sky Cinema Premiere, 1.35pm/10.10pm
This horror film’s bright idea is to refresh the scariness of dark rooms. The spectre that terrorises the heroine (Teresa Palmer) and her family is invisible while lights are on but might appear anywhere as soon as they go off, and though David F Sandberg’s movie may not have much wattage in its storyline, its showmanship blazes when it delivers its frights.
Pride And Prejudice (1940)
BBC2, 2.15pm
More evocative of 1940s Hollywood than of Regency England, this brisk and lightly sugared adaptation has a script co-written by Aldous Huxley, and introduces Greer Garson’s serene Elizabeth to a rather foppish Darcy in the form of Laurence Olivier. Dir: Robert Z Leonard (B/W)
Up There (2012)
BBC1, 12.40am
In this low-budget British comedy, a newly deceased young man (Burn Gorman) finds the afterlife to be a humdrum bureaucratic limbo. Although Zam Salim’s film detains us for only a tiny bit of eternity, it runs out of ideas too soon. The ones it has, however, are engaging.
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Apocalypto (2006)
C4, 12.40am
Mel Gibson certainly took a leap by directing a movie set in pre-colonial Central America, yet the story’s hero, a harassed Mayan (Rudy Youngblood), has things in common with Mad Max, and the film is basically an action movie: its main event is a thrilling chase in a jungle.
Previews by Edward Porter
Radio pick of the day
Sunday Feature (Radio 3, 6.45pm)
Subtitled The Killers, this is not about the US rock band but a US short story — the brutal crime tale by Ernest Hemingway, and its two film versions (first with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in 1946, then Ronald Reagan in 1964). On World Book Club (World Service, 2pm), Jeffrey Archer talks about his stupendously successful novel, Kane and Abel, which sold 50m copies and paid for the Monet on his wall.
Paul Donovan
Sports choice
French Open Tennis (ITV4/Eurosport, 9.30am)
Champions Trophy Cricket India v Pakistan (Sky Sports 2, 10am) Highlights (BBC2, 11.30pm)
Sailing (BT Sport 1, 6pm)
You say
We didn’t need that intrusive so-called music in Inspector George Gently (BBC1) to prompt us to imagine that we should have a sense of suspense. It was spoiled by a cacophony.
Vija McLocklan, Bradford
Gently was contacted by Coles on a Pye PF1 UHF Pocketphone. It is common knowledge that the PF1 was a two-piece device consisting of receiver and transmitter. Coles used the transmitter as both transmitter and receiver!
Alan Vaughan, Minchinhampton
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