Pick of the week
The Sweet Makers (Wednesday, BBC2, 8pm)
Hot on the floury heels of the BBC’s Victorian Bakers comes this historical cookery show, another chance for 21st-century food artisans to see how their skills translate into kitchens fully equipped with dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. Four confectioners travel back to three different time periods to experiment with recipes that confuse modern palates; meanwhile, their guides, the historians Annie Gray and Emma Dabiri, spin out sugar’s complicated politics. This week’s episode visits the 16th century, and the recreation of a “sugar banquet” for a rich Tudor family is the order of the day. Wafers, marchpane, coriander comfits: the recipes are fascinating, and there are many delicious iced gems of information scattered alongside them. Deliciously pre-rotted medlars, for example, were known as “open-arse fruit”, while candied roses were a Tudor gonorrhoea cure. Yet with its interwoven exploration of plantations and the slave trade, the programme also highlights the bitter legacy of all this sweetness.
Victoria Segal
Three-layer sponge
Letterbox (Monday-Friday, BBC2, 6.30pm)
Auntie’s gratitude is extended towards the old Bake Off gang on Monday evening. First, Mel Giedroyc presents a new gameshow in which contestants crack passwords for cash; then Paul Hollywood is forgiven via a Road Trip repeat (7pm); and Nadiya Hussain’s new series is served up at 8.30pm. More Mary Berry and Sue Perkins are in BBC1’s piping line for autumn.
The American songbook
Reginald D Hunter’s Songs of the South (Friday, BBC4, 10pm)
A second time round for this acclaimed documentary. Any good? You Sayer Alex Travers is persuasive: “I can’t recall enjoying a music programme so much, from blues to bluegrass via square dance, but it would have been a poorer programme without the commanding central presence of Hunter, that most eloquent of commentators.”
Advertisement
Best film
Nocturnal Animals (Today, Sky Cinema Premiere, 11.50am/8pm)
Released last year, the second film directed by Tom Ford is an icy psychological thriller starring Amy Adams as a gallery owner shaken by what she reads in a novel by her former husband (Jake Gyllenhaal). It is not a movie that entirely divorces its director from his career as a fashion designer, and its affectations will certainly not be to all tastes, but the grip it exerts is impressive. The story told in the ex-husband’s book, a violent tale set in Texas, is visualised for us, and even though we know this part of the film is fiction within fiction, it has brutal power.
Edward Porter