Lewis
ITV1, 8pm
All is not well at Lady Matilda’s, the last surviving all-female college in Oxford. “Ten years ago,” says Lewis (Kevin Whately), “a girl is attacked. And a decade later certain people who were there on the night of the attack are reunited in the very place where it happened. Hours later one of them is dead.” Makes you think, eh? While all this is going on, DS Hathaway (Laurence Fox) is trying to give up smoking, Lewis’s dormant love life seems to be perking up and Juliet Stevenson pitches in as a feminist academic who has an unhealthy relationship with a coterie of beautiful female students. Still, there is one bleak and beautiful winter scene worthy of Wallander that comes at the very end — but it’s a long old haul for about 15 seconds of classy cinematography.
Civilization: Is the West History?
Channel 4, 8pm
Niall Ferguson’s latest so-called killer app that separated the West from the rest is consumerism.The genius of Western culture was to reconcile mass consumption with rampant individualism, which was achieved through the deployment of two of the heaviest guns of Western society — movies and marketing. An ideological war was fought between socialism and shopping, which the Soviets lost because an economic system based on central planning couldn’t hope to keep pace with the demand for lip gloss. Jeans and rock music did more to undermine the Berlin Wall than Gorbachev and Reagan. But not everyone embraces Western dress, consumerism, and all that it implies. The burka is back.
Louis Theroux: America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis
BBC Two, 9pm
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Five years on, Louis Theroux returns to visit the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, an extended family of religious zealots who believe that everyone in America (apart from themselves) will fry in Hell because of the country’s tolerance of homosexuality. According to their reasoning, the death of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is divine judgment on a depraved nation, so they picket military funerals waving placards saying “FAG TROOPS”. Since the last outing, some of their children have left the sect and thus been consigned to eternal hellfire, and Barack Obama has assumed the role of the Antichrist. “Is it possible you’ve become even more weird?” asks Theroux. Indeed they have.
Imagine: The Trouble with Tolstoy
BBC One, 10.25pm
The final part of this engrossing film follows the second half of Tolstoy’s life as he turned his back on literature, rejected his family, pilloried the Church and embarked on a tormented spiritual journey in search of universal happiness. The film culminates in extraordinary footage of his last days as he lay dying at the obscure railway station of Astapovo. It is tempting to embrace Tolstoy the novelist and reject the tormented polemicist as a crank. “But the real trouble with Tolstoy,” says Alan Yentob, “is that so much of what he advocated — that love is all that matters, violence begets violence and that no man has the right to take control over the life of another — is uncomfortably but unavoidably true.”