Multichannel choice
ART AND THE 60s
BBC Two, 11.20pm
Vanessa Engle has made a gloriously wry and informative film about the revolution in sculpture during the 1960s that paved the way for the artistic free-for-all of today. Anthony Caro, inspired by the freshness of Kenneth Noland’s paintings in New York, led a reaction against the establishment as represented by Henry Moore. His baton was picked up by a new generation of performance and conceptual artists as sculptors moved further and further away from the idea that art meant producing objects. But who cares? “What is really interesting,” says Caro, “is today and tomorrow. And the old days? To hell with them. They’ve had their day.” DC
CAMPBELTOWN
BBC Two, 9pm
A downbeat portrait of life among teenagers in Campbeltown, a small community with a population of 5,000 some four hours’ drive west of Glasgow. Despite being surrounded by beautiful countryside, there is little to encourage young people to stay. There are no jobs and the young complain that there is nothing to do, and those featured in this film get drunk, drive around the centre of the town in circles and dream of leaving. “I don’t know how they can make it much better,” says one. “I think it’s going to become a ghost town.”
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NY-LON
Channel 4, 10pm
This trendy, love-against-the- odds drama series got off to an unpromising start last week, and it is not getting any better. The two lovers (Rashida Jones, below, and Stephen Moyer) are still trying to carry on a relationship from different sides of the Atlantic with little in the way of charm or chemistry; the dialogue strives to be hip and witty and ends up sounding clumsy, and the complications that mess up their relationship are banal and unconvincing. That is merely unfortunate. But a sub-plot involving the death of a former lover’s brother is mawkish, sentimental and repellent.
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SIX FEET UNDER
Channel 4, 11.05pm
Criticising Six Feet Under feels like blasphemy: it has so many outstanding qualities that it seems perverse to make any kind of disparaging comment. Nevertheless, there are worrying signs that it may, just may, be starting to get a little tired. The characters have become so well established that the writers are manoeuvring them into ever more bizarre situations to try to maintain the same level of interest — an approach that is ultimately self-defeating. When Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) says to her new lover: “I was so hoping we could have normal sex”, it sounds more like an artistic judgment than a sexual preference. DC
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Multichannel choice
JAMES HEWITT: CONFESSIONS OF A CAD
The Biography Channel, 9pm
Another chance to see the 2003 Channel 4 documentary that followed James Hewitt for six months during the period that he tried to sell the letters of Diana, Princess of Wales. According to Hewitt: “They’re doing it about me because I’m a complete s**t, and we’re trying to make me less of a s**t. And it’s not working.” It offers an in-depth profile of a total waste of space. Not that he would agree, of course. “My father was always one for having an eye for the women. I reckon it runs in the blood. They should be grateful.” Watching this, it is easy to see why Hewitt has become such a fixture on today’s celebrity reality TV shows. DC
THE ROSETTA STONE
The History Channel, 7pm
A fascinating documentary that explores the history of the Rosetta Stone, a black basalt tablet with a trilingual inscription in Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic found in 1799 at Raschid, near Alexandria. This tablet held the key to deciphering hieroglyphs, but 20 years elapsed before a young French scholar, Jean François Champollion, broke the code and provided the key to the Ancient Egyptian script. If you want to get a closer look at the stone itself, it is on display in the British Museum in London.
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HOLIDAYS IN THE DANGER ZONE: AMERICA WAS HERE
BBC Four, 9pm and 12.20am
After South-East Asia, Ben Anderson travels to Central America and four countries that formed the front line in the US fight against Communism. In Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama, Anderson finds that the revolutions and civil wars of the 1980s are hardly mentioned any more, although they have left their scars. These days poverty, corruption and natural disasters are the major concerns, together with a new killer, drugs — in Nicaragua crack cocaine is as cheap as Coca-Cola and just as popular with the nation’s children. As always, the question of whether US intervention served any good looms large.
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THE WEST WING/THE SOPRANOS/LINE OF FIRE
E4, 9pm/10pm/11.05pm
Tuesday nights on E4 continue to be the home of superior American drama. In The West Wing, Bartlet refuses to be held hostage by the Republicans in the budget negotiations, while CJ prepares Zoey for a sit-down interview about her kidnapping. Over in New Jersey, Tony Soprano is reunited with his wife Carmela, while Feech takes Tony’s crew on a trip down memory lane. And in Line of Fire, Paige pursues a pregnant fugitive and Roy learns that his murdered partner may have had dirty dealings with Malloy. Now why can’t every night have television as good as this? MM