CRITIC’S CHOICE
Pick of the day
Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1, 8pm)
Ricky Tomlinson is resolutely born of working-class Merseyside and its docks. “There’s a certain warmth about Liverpool people,” he says, proudly. “They make you welcome.” And indeed he does — the tight geography of his search means the cameras frequently follow him home at night to chat to his wife, Rita, about what he has learnt of the generations that preceded him.
His responses are fascinating, in light of his past life as a union organiser (jailed after a strike in 1972) and current work as an actor, as he accesses tremendous reserves of fury. “How can you get upset about something that happened nearly 150 years ago?” he asks, tearfully, when he learns of the bloody fate of his great-great-grandfather. “But I’m so angry.” The Queen of Sheba episode of The Royle Family, featuring Liz Smith’s sublime performance as Nana, follows at 9pm.
Helen Stewart
Hero takes a fall
Close To The Enemy (BBC2, 9pm)
Stephen Poliakoff’s postwar drama comes to a close with Callum beginning to unravel. Apart from Jim Sturgess’s irritating drawl, one of the most difficult things about the character of Callum Ferguson was that nothing touched him; he was a Teflon-coated hero suffering nightmares only in his sleep, and for viewers he was hard to like. What action there is in this final episode merely underlines the absolute lack of it in the six previous episodes.
Goodbye to Red Vienna
Vienna — Empire, Dynasty And Dream (BBC4, 9pm)
Syphilitic suicide pacts, troublesome Italians, anarchist stabbings, aristocratic mega-vamps: there is never a dull moment in the final part of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s history of Vienna. As the city hurtles into the 20th century, however, the darkness intensifies, the Austrian capital’s standing as a “city of ideas” undermined by the outbreak of the First World War and its connections to Stalin and Hitler. Finally, Montefiore discusses the deportation of Vienna’s Jewish population by the Nazis — a story that connects with his own family history.
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Watching you ...
Astrospies (PBS America, 9pm)
In the depths of the Cold War, both America and Russia were frustrated by the limitations of unmanned satellite photographs and wary of the vulnerability of spy planes. Both initiated covert programmes to launch astronauts on spying missions — what the author Asif Siddiqi calls “the shadow space programme … the one without parades”. This atmospheric film reveals the details of America’s secretive scheme for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory and Russia’s Almaz space station, including previously unseen footage of training missions and interviews with participants.
One for pointy heads
QI (BBC2, 10pm)
Was this show supposed to go out on Christmas Day? Sandi Toksvig certainly appeared to think so when she wrote in her introduction that “the turkey is in the oven, the Queen’s speech is on yuletube and it’s time to see what’s under the tree”, and under Stephen Fry’s aegis it was broadcast on the big day in 2014 and 2015. The guests are from the same stable of quippy comedy (Susan Calman, Matt Lucas, Josh Widdecombe and Alan Davies), so why the change? It would be Quite Interesting to find out.
Helen Stewart and Victoria Segal
Radio pick of the day
Martha Reeves’ Soul Christmas (R2, 8pm)
The great American star plays festive Motown hits, standards and Christmas carols, the performers ranging from Mahalia Jackson to the Ronettes: the superb music is interspersed with memories of her childhood in Detroit and singing at the White House. Two touching, poignant repeats are PL Travers’s magical Nativity story The Fox At The Manger (R4 Extra, 11.15am/9.15pm), from 1990, and Sue Townsend’s Mole Cooks His Goose (R4 Extra, 2pm), an Adrian Mole tale from 1993.
Paul Donovan
FILM CHOICE
The Fox And The Child (2007)
(BBC2, 8.30am)
Luc Jacquet, who made the documentary March of the Penguins, turns to fiction, but without abandoning the practices of wildlife film-making. Indeed, this drama’s best parts are the skilfully shot scenes that focus on the promised fox and other creatures in the film’s patch of rural France. The accompanying story — about a girl who wants a brush-tailed friend — is rather twee, but the natural world supplies moments of tension.
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Mad Max — Fury Road (2015)
(Sky Cinema Greats, 6.20am/11pm)
This late addition to the Australian action saga is a frenzy of car chases and fights that makes even its closest precedent, Mad Max 2, look like a London-to-Brighton run of vintage motors. Fresh young talent, including Tom Hardy as the hero, assists in the revamp, but the director is the series’s old master, George Miller.
Alan Partridge — Alpha Papa (2013)
(BBC2, 11.05pm)
The small measure of prestige Steve Coogan’s buffoon gains here — as a key player in a hostage situation — is perhaps an unwise upgrade for a character who is funniest when humbled, but the film still has fine jokes. Dir: Declan Lowney
The Breakfast Club (1985)
(Film 4, 1.30am)
Starring a bunch of young actors who were celebrities at the time, John Hughes’s high-school drama now serves as a tutorial on fame’s transience. Still, you don’t need to have been a 1980s teenager to enjoy the film’s heartfelt story of pupils bonding with one another during detention.
Edward Porter