CRITICS’ CHOICE
Pick of the day
Urban Myths (Sky Arts, 10pm)
It must be hard being Bob Dylan. Every sandwich eaten, cab taken and coffee drunk may be occasions of mundane consumption to him; but to the sandwich-maker, the cab driver and the cafe owner, they become “the day I met Bob Dylan”. Neil Webster’s comedy — the first in a run of four that take as their plot a possibly apocryphal anecdote — follows Dylan as he tries to visit Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics in north London but turns up at the door of a plumber with a similar name.
As Dylan, Eddie Marsan obediently leaves his cowboy boots in the hallway and stays to watch Blockbusters when the wrong Dave (Paul Ritter) returns home. “You are him, aren’t you?” asks the host, to which our enigmatic hero answers: “Him? Yes, but then so are you.” Fans of the expanded versions of this Crouch End-based legend might like to know that Banner’s restaurant does get a look in.
Helen Stewart
Sugar and spice and ...
Masterchef Junior USA (W, 8pm)
Gordon Ramsay heads up the American version of Masterchef’s juvenile franchise. Over here, on CBBC, the young competitors are precocious but still sweet and unassuming: these 8- to 13-year- olds unleash horrendous, Trump-like boasts, competing for the chance to win $100,000 — an obscene amount for a children’s contest. In this first round, they make “signature” burgers, create marshmallow-based dishes and shriek as if they are being boiled. Ramsay does his best to be jolly but he, like the viewer, must be wishing the witch from Hansel and Gretel was among his judging colleagues.
Love in a warm climate
Death In Paradise (BBC1, 9pm)
Humphrey and Martha’s “holiday romance” is coming to an end. She is returning home and is excited about her new job and he can’t just come right out and tell her he adores her, so they have booked a romantic goodbye weekend at a hotel on an even smaller tropical island than Saint Marie. Wouldn’t you just know it, though; by the time the pair have ordered their main courses there is a suspicious death in one of the bedrooms and Humphrey is not only the chief investigator, but also the main witness.
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Keeping it clean
Horizon (BBC2, 9pm)
Giles Yeo has such a lovable face and such scientific credibility (he is a geneticist at Cambridge, with a particular interest in what makes us fat) that he gets away with considerable cheek investigating the phenomenon of “clean” eating. In Britain, he makes the Hemsley sisters’ bone broth recipe (“you might call it stock”) and chats candidly with Deliciously Ella (Mills), but when he travels to America he bares his teeth, confronting millionaires behind fads that have inspired millions to give up gluten or encouraged cancer patients to eat only alkaline food in hope of a cure.
Sunny disposition
Unforgotten (ITV, 9pm)
Pretty much every conversation in this densely woven police drama involves one character asking another: “Is there anything you want to talk about?” The answer, of course, is always no; everyone’s past is thick with secrets and everyone is in hiding from the truth. At this halfway point in the series, however, there are signs that David Walker’s murder might be solved. DS Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) discovers a new line of inquiry from the victim’s childhood, while lawyer Colin (Mark Bonnar), teacher Sara (Badria Timimi) and, most intriguingly, volatile nurse Marion (Rosie Cavaliero), feel the heat of the investigation burning ever fiercer on their backs.
Unflinching comedy
Chewing Gum (E4, 10pm)
“I’m a grown woman,” says Michaela Coel’s Tracey, “I just regularly make childlike mistakes.” That’s a difficult balancing trick for a sitcom character to pull off without being horribly “kooky”, but Coel’s writing is sharp, funny and just filthy enough to make her second run of this series a delight to watch. There are, however, plenty of almost unwatchably uncomfortable moments in this episode, Coel pulling no punches when it comes to addressing race and sex; but there is also a great deal of sweetness, too, as Tracey tries to fulfil her mother’s requirements for her moving back home (“Speak in tongues and heal a sick person”) and reveals a charming ignorance about the biology of farm animals.
Helen Stewart and Victoria Segal
Sport choice
Australian Open Tennis (Eurosport, 6am/12 midnight)
ODI Cricket (Sky Sports 2, 7.30am) India v England
Masters Snooker (BBC2, 1pm)
Africa Cup Of Nations Algeria v Tunisia (Eurosport, 3.45pm); Senegal v Zimbabwe (Eurosport, 6.45pm)
World Rally Championship (BT Sport 1, 7pm)
Radio pick of the day
The Chastity Butterworth Show (R4, 11pm)
Gemma Whelan, from Game of Thrones, stars in this new spoof chat show said to follow in the tradition of Mrs Merton and The Kumars at No 42. Earlier, on In Our Time (R4, 9am FM/9.30pm), Melvyn Bragg probes the colourful story of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was jailed and beheaded on the orders of her cousin, Elizabeth I, in 1587. His guests are Cambridge’s John Guy, Edinburgh’s Anna Groundwater, and David Forsyth, the chief curator at the National Museum of Scotland.
Paul Donovan
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You say
Once again you preview a programme only available on All 4, an online-only service. It looks interesting, but who wants to watch something like it on a computer? I gather that some content is sometimes also shown on Channel 4. Perhaps a television-listings magazine should confine itself to reviewing that?
Paul Rouse
I’m totally distraught — never mind wrong versions of Routemasters et al. In BBC1’s Father Brown (The Chedworth Cyclone) it was all pure American slang (mob, extortion, racketeering etc etc) — poor old GK must be turning in his grave. Perhaps worst of all, the weigh-in for the big fight was conducted in pounds, not stones and pounds — which only served to confuse the script editor: 184lb, or just over 13st, for a couple of — at best — welterweights?
Cornelius O’Kane
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Film choice
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True Grit (1969)
More 4, 11.05am
The Coen brothers’ sober 2010 film of Charles Portis’s novel certainly showed up the hokiness of this earlier version, but it is not as if that quality in Henry Hathaway’s western had previously gone unnoticed. As the battered but valiant marshal Rooster Cogburn, John Wayne plays shamelessly to the gallery.
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Ant-Man (2015)
Sky Cinema Superheroes, 1.15pm/12.45am
Stuck with a hero (Paul Rudd) who does little more than shrink to insect stature, Peyton Reed’s film wisely keeps its ambitions small. The story is no big deal, but the jokes dotted through it enlarge its entertainment value: they cut the pretensions of other superhero movies down to size.
Legend (1985)
Film 4, 7.10pm
Starring Tom Cruise as a heroic, slightly elfin woodlander, Ridley Scott’s odd mixture of fairy-tale whimsy and sword-and-sorcery action flopped in its day, but it might be an intriguing prospect if you feel like comparing it with the fantasy movies now in fashion — or if you just want to see Cruise looking a bit silly.
Edward Porter