Pick of the week
Idris Elba — Fighter (Tuesday, Discovery, 10pm)
Ross Kemp’s military manoeuvres and Vinnie Jones’s travelogues might have looked like the final word in macho television, but this three-part series shows there is a new tough guy in town. Idris Elba, 43, wants to be more than just a Hollywood bruiser — he has given himself 12 months to become a professional kickboxer. With the help of his actor friend Warren Brown, a champion fighter, he begins his mission to wreck his “beautiful” face, heading to Japan for special training. Tears do fall alongside the blood and sweat, but there’s not too much soft centre to this hard-man show.
Victoria Segal
A missed opportunity
The Inauguration of Donald Trump
The schedules go Trump crazy this week, with much comedy — The Roast Of Donald Trump (today, C5, 11.05pm); Jack Dee’s Inauguration Helpdesk (Thursday, BBC2, 10pm) — and serious investigations in Dispatches (Monday, C4, 8pm), Panorama (Monday, BBC1, 8.30pm) and Tonight (Thursday, ITV, 7.30pm), plus a profile of The Boy Who Tried To Kill Trump (Friday, BBC3). CBBC should have chipped in by having a Trumpton marathon.
Whatever you want
Status Quo Night (Friday, BBC4, from 10pm)
Is 2017 going to turn into 12 months of programmes about the artists we lost in 2016? This week it doffs its hat in the direction of Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt, with Hello Quo (10pm), a documentary on the band’s five-decade career, and Live And Acoustic (11.20pm), a sedate London show from 2014. Who would have predicted a tribute on the BBC’s highbrow TV network when the Quo started legal proceedings after being blacklisted by Radio 1 in 1996?
Film of the week
My Darling Clementine (Tuesday, Film 4, 12.50pm)
Many John Ford westerns, including a few of the classics, are not as subtle as modern viewers might wish, but his 1946 film about Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) coming to Tombstone has magic in it. As well as being superbly photographed, it refines its symbolic story by means of countless small, telling moments of realism. It even draws a resonant performance from the usually stolid Victor Mature, cast as Doc Holliday.
Edward Porter