STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
ITV1, 9pm
Kay Mellor’s Strictly Confidential is similar in tone to the BBC’s Cutting It, only here the hairdressing salon has been replaced by a sex-therapy clinic. Both dramas feature a web of contrived relationships between attractive people, and both are easy enough to watch as long as you aren’t doctrinaire about the need for authentic characters and real situations. It is a soap opera spiced up with a murder mystery and some jocular sex therapy, all expressed through clunking dialogue. Tonight’s episode features an arrest for murder, a woman addicted to porn, an impotent Turk and an insemination. “It visits an uncomfortable area that some people will find shocking,” says the writer. But not, perhaps, in the way that she intended.
THE CATHERINE TATE SHOW
BBC Two, 9pm
The comic volume has been cranked up for this final episode in the series, which ends on a surreal flourish. Most of the dud sketches from earlier in the series have been dropped, although there is one — in which a posh boy sings Jerusalem after eating a gooseberry-and-cinnamon yoghurt past its sell-by date — that is strange rather than funny. But it’s the old favourites that carry the day. Ms Am-I-Bovvered has a furious argument with a female vicar. The How-Very-Dare-You gay is riper and fruitier than ever. Best of all, Sheila Hancock makes a guest appearance as the sister of the misanthropic granny, back home for a visit from Spain’s Costa del Crime, which allows the two foul-mouthed old crones to reminisce about the good old days.
CHURCHILL’S GIRL
Channel 4, 9pm
Advertisement
Pamela Churchill Harriman was an old-school courtesan. Determined to escape the boredom of Dorset country life, she married Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, and spent the rest of her life seducing some of the richest and most powerful men in the Western world. She was a shrewd judge of character and her ability to manipulate men was second to none; so, too, was her acquisitive self-interest. After a lifetime of opportunistic courtship, she transformed herself into a woman of substance by supporting the Democrats in America, for which she was rewarded with the US ambassadorship to France. “Maybe she’s a good lesson that you should always try to take advantage of whatever you can take advantage of,”’ says Lally Weymouth, a senior editor at Newsweek. “Because that she certainly did.”
LEAD BALLOON
BBC Two, 9.30pm
Already shown on BBC Four, this is the final part of Jack Dee’s sporadically laugh-out-loud sitcom, which has occasionally tended to suffer from a sense of straining to fit the situation around the joke. For instance, the main problem troubling Rick Spleen (Dee) tonight is that everyone he meets points out that he has put on weight — something that most socially adequate human beings would never do. But that implausible hook allows a storyline to develop that results in a toe-curling encounter in the gym locker room worthy of Ricky Gervias or Larry David. The characters — particularly Spleen’s sardonic writing partner Marty (Sean Power) and his über-miserable au pair Magda (Anna Crilly) — have also been great, so a second series would be good news.
MULTICHANNEL TELEVISION
James Jackson
VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY
BBC Four, 9pm
Advertisement
Episode two of Paul Rose’s informative history of world-changing voyages tilts towards the story of Captain Cook. As with last week, the sprightly adventurer clambers around the rigging of a replica vessel to recount his tale, here explaining how Cook’s expedition pioneered the field of botany (thanks to the cook Joseph Banks) before running aground on the Great Barrier Reef — discovering the vast southern continent that, it was believed, “balanced the Earth”. As with last week, actors re-create the grim realities of life during a long voyage, not least the scurvy.
PETE BURNS UNSPUN
Living TV, 9pm
Be afraid . . . The trout-lipped, cross-dressing praying mantis from the pop band Dead or Alive and this year’s Celebrity Big Brother is given an hour-long documentary to bare his soul as he tries to “show a transformation to triumph”. Since leaving the reality show, the acid-tongued Scouser wound up in Wandsworth prison, charged with harassing a boyfriend. A camera crew accompany him on his release as he records a single, sorts out recurrent medical problems and — in surely the most outlandish TV moment of the year — meets the deranged number one fan who provided his bail. Extraordinary viewing on so many levels.
BLUNDER
E4, 10pm
More hit-and-miss comic grotesquerie. Among tonight’s oddball skits we see Colonel Rudd, the maverick vet, mistake a horse rider for a horse; the Singing Cat takes on the Corrie theme tune; and Massie the ventriloquist fall out with her puppet.
Advertisement
MY SHOCKING STORY: STRONGEST GIRL IN THE WORLD
Discovery, 10pm
The latest in this shock-doc strand concerns a 14-year-old Ukrainian girl, Varya Akulova, who claims to be the strongest girl in the world. At 5, she could powerlift 150kg (330lb); recently, she carried a combined weight of 297kg (655lb), five times her bodyweight. Her 11-month-old sister, meanwhile, is already lifting weights in the cradle, as she is groomed to take over Varya’s title. The usual question is asked — are they a genetic phenomenon or the product of an obsessive father? In this case, Dad is a Hercules with designs on breeding “superchildren” and seems confident that the exercises he sets his daughter aren’t risking injury.
PULLING
BBC Three, 10.30pm
Sharon Horgan’s amusingly rude sex comedy continues with her doubt-riven character, Donna, discovering her ex-fiancé, Karl, in the process of hanging himself before she attends a dire party. Modern love lives never looked so desperate.
LIVE CRICKET: AUSTRALIA v ENGLAND
Sky Sports 1, midnight
Advertisement
No rest for the Ashes players as they reconvene tonight (our time) in Adelaide for the second Test. Point of Wisden trivia: the picturesque Adelaide Oval is where the Bodyline affair reached its nadir in January 1933, when Bill Woodfull and Bert Oldfield were struck, and mounted police patrolled to keep spectators in order.