DISPATCHES: BRITAIN’S COMMUTER NIGHTMARE
Channel 4, 8pm
The most provocative programme of the week. Bob Kiley, who has just finished five years as London’s Transport Commissioner, describes Britain’s transport system as a mess. “It needs everyone’s attention,” he says, “everyone’s help. It needs money. It needs hard thinking. And we need to do it now.” The solutions he offers are clear, challenging and politically lethal. The number of cars has to be reduced by some form of road pricing, allowing the proceeds to be invested in public transport. Local authorities should be given the responsibility to create an integrated transport system and the power to raise money to run it, and one person should be put in charge of the railways. But who will have the political will to do it?
BETJEMAN AND ME
BBC Two, 9pm
Griff Rhys Jones’s wonderful appreciation of the life and work of John Betjeman will have enthusiasts reaching for their anthologies, while showing the rest of us why he became Britain’s last great popular poet. It is an exemplary profile; like the poetry, it is sincere, insightful and effortlessly funny. It describes Betjeman’s childhood, his adolescent snobbery, his self-ridicule, his religious faith and sexual fantasy, his respect for the decency and desperation of ordinary lives and the jauntiness that masked an underlying melancholy. Nor could you hope for better contributors, who include John Mortimer, Joanna Lumley and Dame Edna Everage. It is so accomplished and accessible that you barely notice the skill involved. Betjeman would have loved that.
TO KIDNAP A PRINCESS
ITV1, 9pm
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This purports to be a dramatisation of the events surrounding the attempted kidnapping of the Princess Royal in The Mall in 1974. Her would-be kidnapper, a schizophrenic named Ian Ball, fired 11 shots and wounded four people. He said the £3 million ransom would have helped to fund the National Health Service, and he is still detained in Broadmoor under Section 60 of the Mental Health Act. Facts aside, this docudrama needs to be seen to be believed. With Princess Anne resembling Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds, it contains some of the most embarrassing re-enactments yet shown on television — and that’s going some.
CUTTING EDGE: CULT KILLER
Channel 4, 9pm
Tonight’s mind-blowing Cutting Edge begins with a videotaped suicide note, in which a young man called Rick Rodriguez proposes to murder his mother and end his own life. He was brought up in a cult that was known as the Children of God, and is now known simply as “The Family”. Their practice of free love allegedly extended to institutionalised paedophilia, and the children were brainwashed into believing that this was an expression of love and pleasing to God. Rodriguez’s mother runs the cult. “I’ve tried so many things,” he says in his suicide tape. “Trying to somehow fit in, somehow to find a normal life. Anger does not begin to describe how I feel about these people and what they have done.” And so he went in pursuit of justice.
MULTICHANNEL TELEVISION
by James Jackson
THE OC
E4, 3pm
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Rewiding to series one, episode one, the exploits of Ryan, Marissa, Seth and Summer will be shown each afternoon at 3pm.
THE WOMAN WHO ATE SCOTLAND
UKTV Food, 5.30pm
Food lover Nell Nelson gets on her bike for a gastronomic tour, taking in some spectacularly rugged scenery en route.
SINGLE MUMS SOS WITH KATE AND EMILY
Discovery Home and Health, 7pm
Yet another straight-talking motivational duo offering lifestyle advice. This time, single mothers are the subject and Kate and Emily are the upbeat gurus, encouraging the mums to think positive, develop new hobbies, build non-toxic relationships with their ex-partners and create strong support networks.
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THE STATE OF RUSSIA: DEATH OF A NATION
More4, 9pm
Repeat of Marcel Theroux’s “personal journey through Putin’s Russia”, meeting super-wealthy oligarchs and the destitute and asking why the country is going to the dogs.
WHO KILLED DIANA?
Sky One, 9pm
Another investigation poring over the grisly details of the crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, teasingly promising to uncover new evidence and answer such questions as why it took so long for Diana to be transported to hospital and whether the driver Henri Paul was a spy. Conspiracy theorists — David Icke, the Daily Express — rise to the bait, but ultimately there are no startling revelations.
STORYVILLE: OVERNIGHT
BBC Four, 10pm
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The rise and fall of Troy Duffy is a Hollywood tale with the distinct whiff of sulphur about it. In the late 1990s, Duffy was an obnoxious wannabe working as a bartender when he got a surprise call from the Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein’s office accepting his first-time script. Amazingly, Weinstein also offered Duffy the opportunity to direct the film and for a while it looked as if another Quentin Tarantino had arrived. Sadly, power and money were mainlined into Duffy’s ego and everything came crashing, as chronicled in this horribly compelling film.
FRASIER
Paramount, 10pm
A double bill from when the show was perhaps just past its sparkling best, but boasted some intriguing guest stars. In tonight’s first episode, for example, Frasier celebrates his 2,000th radio broadcast, only to discover that his archive of tapes is in the hands of an obsessive fan — played by Bill Gates.
CONSPIRACIES: TITANIC — THE SHIP THAT NEVER SANK
Sky Two, 11pm
Another chance to see this 2004 programme investigating an outrageous conspiracy claim: the author Robin Gardiner reckons that the tragedy of April 15, 1912, was part of an elaborate simulation that went wrong.