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The World’s Busiest Railway 2015
BBC Two, 9pm
The scale of the Indian railway system defies belief in so many ways that it would be hard to make a dull series about it — and Dan Snow, Anita Rani, Robert Llewellyn and John Sergeant were never going to let that happen. In this four-part series, which continues at the same time until Thursday, they travel around the network and find out how it functions, beginning at the famous Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai, built by the British in 1887 like a cross between a Mogul palace and a cathedral. Here the trains are so packed at rush hour that travel turns into a contact sport. The trains stay at the station for three-and-a-half minutes, the doors are never closed, double-discharge platforms were introduced in 1990 so that passengers can get on and off on both sides, people dangle precariously outside the carriages, and you haven’t a hope of going anywhere if you’re not prepared to push and shove. Nine people are killed on the railway network every day, but at least it’s cheap — a second-class season ticket costs £2.15 a month. The movement of every train is tracked on a 12m long LED screen, but according to the station master: “During peak time we just pray to God nothing goes wrong.” It is organised chaos at its most fraught, sweaty and competitive.
Discovering: Paul Newman
Sky Arts, 7pm
The film critics Derek Malcolm and Neil Norman contribute to this whirlwind resumé of Paul Newman’s life on and off the screen. It is a timely reminder of the sheer number of exceptional films in which he starred — from Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler and Cool Hand Luke to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and Absence of Malice. And then there was his love of motor racing, his lifetime support for the Democrats (he once said that his greatest achievement in life was reaching No 19 on Richard Nixon’s list of enemies) and the $370 million he raised for charity through his food empire. In life as in art, he never lost his dignity, authority and gravitas.
Parks and Recreation
Dave, 8pm
Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), the daffy queen of the Parks Department, has been having a clandestine affair with the super-nerd Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott). Although both are exemplary employees, their affair flies in the face of government regulations that forbid romantic relationships between superiors and their employees lest they lead to fraud, corruption and a misuse of public funds. When the affair is made public, Knope is suspended for two weeks and the star-crossed lovers are summoned to appear before an ethics committee. Nothing, however, is going to dampen Knope’s radiant optimism and she can scarcely wait for her day in court. “I’ve seen over 200 episodes of Law and Order,” she says, “and it’s paying off big time.”
24 Hours in Police Custody
Channel 4, 9pm
Tonight is the last episode in the current run of this superb series, and it shows the challenges faced by the police as they are forced to become social workers without the appropriate training. A 28-year-old woman is brought in after head-butting a doorman, and it took six officers to restrain her. “Something mad happens when I’ve had a few drinks,” she says. A man who has been diagnosed as bipolar is arrested in the throes of full-blown mania for harassing a female friend. And finally there is a big bloke who attacked a taxi driver and clearly isn’t operating on the same planet as everyone else. A police station is not the right place to treat mental-health issues.
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Show Me a Hero
Sky Atlantic, 9pm
In the second episode of this enthralling HBO series from David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, the city of Yonkers under its young mayor Nick Wasicsko (Oscar Isaac) has been ordered by a federal court judge to end years of illegal housing segregation, which in turn unleashes a torrent of racism, defiance and death threats. “These people,” says a white resident of Yonkers. “They don’t live the way we do. They don’t want what we want.” Despite rabble-rousing council meetings in City Hall that make the recent Greek debt negotiations look tame by comparison, the judge is threatening to impose crippling fines for non-compliance and there are no grounds for appeal. “You know what?” says the mayor. “We can get past this.” Really?
Soup Cans and Superstars: How Pop Art Changed the World
BBC Four, 9pm
Combine this programme with the unusual A Day in the Life of Andy Warhol (Tuesday, BBC Four, 9pm) and it’s a cracking week for Pop Art on telly. Inspired in part by the billboards, signs and advertisements that litter the American landscape, many people regard Pop Art as little more than a vacuous fad. Not Alastair Sooke. In this persuasive and passionate programme, he argues that Pop Art brought modern art to the masses, using the lessons of advertising to sell a far more ambiguous, often critical portrait of the dawning of the consumer age. He meets the survivors of the movement — Rosenquist, Oldenburg, Ruscha, Blake et al — who eroded the boundaries between high and low culture and created a vision of the future that we are inhabiting today.
Muslim Drag Queens
Channel 4, 10pm
It’s not easy being a Muslim drag queen, even in liberal Britain. “I have to fight every day just to be me,” says Asifa. “I receive constant death threats. I’ve heard people say my parents should burn in Hell for bringing me into the world.” Just as drag queens headed the fight for gay rights in the Sixties, Asifa wants to use his performances to campaign for gay Asian rights today. He refuses to believe that Islamic tradition and sexual expression are mutually exclusive. “I pray. I go to the mosque every week. I fast during Ramadan. I finished the Koran. I’ve been on pilgrimage. I give to charity. I am a very good Muslim.” If only those fundamentalists could be persuaded.
Film choice by Wendy Ide
Hellboy (2004)
Film4, 9pm
He’s an angry demon, conjured by the Nazis, scalded red in colour. His right hand is a huge sledgehammer of a fist that is made of rock. From his brow sprout two horns, but in his one concession to vanity, he files them down to a pair of stumps. Yet as outlandish as his character’s appearance might sound, Ron Perlman manages to inject more humanity into Hellboy than you’ll find in all of the X-Men put together. This is largely thanks to the writer/director Guillermo del Toro’s wry and affectionate screenplay, adapted with his trademark blend of dry humour and neo-gothic sensibility from a series of comics created by Mike Mignola. Despite being a Nazi construct, Hellboy now fights for the forces of good, which is just as well because creatures from the mythical world are rebelling against humanity and trying to take over the Earth. (122min)
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No Country for Old Men (2007)
Sky Movies Greats, 9.45pm
Josh Brolin has a knack for delivering the kind of performance that elevates a film. The Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel is no exception. Taciturn hunter Llewelyn Moss (Brolin) stumbles upon $2million and a lot of corpses in the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. He takes the money — and seals his own fate. On his tail, killing pretty much anyone he encounters, is Javier Bardem as the mechanically efficient hired killer Anton Chigurh (weapon of choice: bolt gun; haircut of choice: ridiculous, but you probably wouldn’t want to tell him). Roger Deakins’s faultless cinematography is as much a star of the film as any of the cast. Film fact: this was the only film of the 2000s to take less than $2 million on its opening weekend, and still go on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. (122min)
Radio choice by Catherine Nixey
Charisma: Pinning Down the Butterfly
Radio 4, 1.45pm
Francine Stock has never met Bill Clinton — she was in a queue once, but gave up before reaching the front. So she can’t testify to that great chorus of admirers who have led to him being the man in the western world who, apparently, is most often credited with possessing charisma. But she can testify to the fact that those in the queue in front of her bent like poppies in the wind before him. Here, she tries to pin that slippery virtue down, tracing it from St Paul to Max Weber. As the academic John Adair beautifully puts it, Weber thought charisma “is not a thing that somebody has, it’s a relationship. It takes two to tango.”
The Unbelievable Truth
Radio 4, 6.30pm
David Mitchell returns for another series of the truth-smuggling panel game. Among those attempting to lie with impunity this week are the comedians Henning Wehn, Sara Pascoe and Miles Jupp, who will be talking on topics as diverse as Austria (a country that possesses a channel that plays The Sound of Music 24 hours a day), swans and onions.