Viewing guide, by David Chater
The Young Pope
Sky Atlantic, 9pm/10.10pm
Paolo Sorrentino’s drama finishes tonight with a double bill, ending the most mesmerising, unusual, gorgeous — and frequently moving — television event of the year. It was not perfect, but a flawed masterpiece is still a masterpiece and the scale of its ambition drowned out the few discordant notes. The timing of its broadcast has been extraordinary. As liberal values are being hammered all around the world, it did not require a huge leap of faith to accept the idea of a hardline Pope who quotes the Old Testament, vilifies homosexuals, declares abortion to be an unforgivable sin and refuses to court the media. Much of the fascination of the series was the enigma of the Pope himself, captured superbly by Jude Law. It took time to reveal how a man who appeared devoid of empathy and compassion might also be a saint. That does not mean his unforgiving views went unchallenged; his attitudes to abortion and homosexuality are roundly condemned by the liberal wing of the Vatican — so effectively that even he admits room for doubt. “You’re spreading a sorrow you don’t even understand,” he is told, “and that’s the worst thing a human being can do.” This was also one of the rare occasions that the cancer of paedophilia in the Catholic church has been tackled head-on in a television drama, with Archbishop Kurtwell of New York (Guy Boyd) assuming he was too important to be held to account “because it would lead to pure pandemonium”. How wrong he was. And all these intangibles, contradictions and complexities were shrouded in images of hallucinatory beauty. Sorrentino won an Oscar for his film The Great Beauty, and here he has deployed the same breathtaking aesthetic to a story with muscle, guts and soul.
Who Do You Think You Are?
BBC One, 8pm
Cheryl Tweedy first became famous when she appeared on the television talent show Popstars: The Rivals in 2002. It earned her a place in the pop group Girls Aloud, who went on to have 20 consecutive Top 10 singles. She was married to the former England footballer Ashley Cole and appeared as a judge on The X Factor. She grew up in a large family on a council estate in Newcastle, descended from a long line of miners and mariners. Her great-grandfather was a drunk and angry man who, it transpires, managed to survive four years on the Western Front.
Close to the Enemy
BBC Two, 9pm
With one episode to go, Close to the Enemy is finally picking up a head of steam. The inscrutable Harold Lindsay-Jones (Alfred Molina) is threatening to expose the incompetence of the Foreign Office for failing to endorse the assassination of Hitler before the outbreak of the war. And our handsome, piano-playing warrior (Jim Sturgess), who has an irritating way of appearing to be good at everything, is raging at the incompetence of an establishment that failed to finance the development of the jet engine before the war. “Their time has come,” he says. “We are their nemesis.”
Grand Designs: House of the Year
Channel 4, 9pm
Before announcing the winner, Kevin McCloud looks at four more houses competing for a place on the shortlist — all of which were built on impossible sites. One of them fuses Asian Zen with an English country garden. Another is a sculptural collection of brightly coloured steel-clad buildings built on a patch of wasteland in north London. The third is a modern house in a Manchester suburb that was subject to 30 separate objections from local residents. Finally there is a concrete-and-timber house with stunning elevated views across the Northumberland countryside. Grand Designs remains the inspirational face of property porn.
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Vienna: Empire, Dynasty and Dream
BBC Four, 9pm
In the second of a three-part series, Simon Sebag Montefiore describes a triumphant Vienna that saw off Turks in 1683 and the French at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. There was a further consolidation of its power and influence under the great stateswoman, Maria Theresa, who became sovereign at the age of 23 after her father died of mushroom poisoning. This was the golden age of the House of Hapsburg, when Vienna — at the heart of a multinational empire of Hungarians, Italians, Bohemians and Austrians — became a beacon of the arts, a capital of music and a laboratory of enlightened and despotic ideology.
Catch-up TV, by Joe Clay
Whites v Blacks: How Football Changed a Nation
BBC iPlayer, to December 27
On May 16, 1979, a testimonial match was played for Len Cantello, a West Bromwich Albion midfielder who had served the club for a decade. However, this was no ordinary match — it was to be played between an all-white team and a side comprising only black players. Cyrille Regis, Brendon Batson and Laurie Cunningham, the three black players infamously referred to by Ron Atkinson, the West Brom manager at the time, as “the Three Degrees”, were charged with bringing the idea to fruition. The match went ahead and the black players won 3-2. In this thought-provoking film Adrian Chiles, a lifelong West Brom fan, looks at the legacy of the match, uncovering rare footage and reuniting players from both teams, including Regis and Batson.
Film choice, by Wendy Ide
Down with Love (12, 2003)
Film4, 7pm
An affectionate pastiche of the chaste romantic comedies of the 1960s, this film comes equipped with a kicky soundtrack, a fabulous selection of neat little hats for its star, Renée Zellweger, and a paper-thin plot. Zellweger plays an authoress whose bestseller, Down with Love, is causing shock waves in relationships throughout New York City. Enter ladies’ man and journalist Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor). Block vows to make the lady eat her words and fall in love him. His plan is then to share the details with his readers in Know magazine. It’s frothy and silly, but there’s an innocent charm to the film. (101min)
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Wanderlust (15, 2012)
Film4, 11.10pm
This is much more traditional Paul Rudd territory than last year’s unexpected foray into super-heroics via Ant-Man. Having just climbed on to the property ladder, George (Rudd) loses his job and his wife, Linda (Jennifer Aniston), fails to sell her documentary. In one day, the couple are priced out of their high-stress New York life. They decide to stay with George’s brother, but along the way, exhausted, the couple crash out in a B&B with a difference. Elysium is a New Age collective full of joy and smiles and wind chimes. George and Linda start to think that this is a place where they could make a life for themselves. While George harbours doubts, Linda sheds her inhibitions and her bra. Savagely funny. (98min)
The Ghost (15, 2010)
Film4, 1.05am
The atmosphere is charged from the opening scene of Roman Polanski’s paranoid political thriller based on Robert Harris’s novel. Alexandre Desplat’s score, channelling Philip Glass, creates an immediate tension in a seemingly banal shot — the unloading of a car ferry. A man is drowned, and it turns out he was the ghost writer of the autobiography of the former British prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan, channelling his inner Tony Blair). Ewan McGregor is “The Ghost”, his replacement. However, the film’s main asset is Olivia Williams as Lang’s acidic wife, Ruth — it’s not until the end that you realise how good she is. (128min)
Radio choice, by Catherine Nixey
A Beginner’s Guide to India
Radio 4, 6.30pm
“It’s not racist to say that Indians bobble their heads,” explains the comedian Aditi Mittal in this, the first of two programmes about the subcontinent. “It’s just racist to imitate it.” Now naturally the words “comedian” and “Radio 4” in close proximity will probably leave you feeling twitchy, but don’t, because Mittal is, in fact, laugh-out-loud-as-you-listen-in-your-kitchen funny. Like so much of the best radio comedy it reverses the principle of the Ig Nobels: first it makes you think, then it makes you laugh. Here, Mittal discusses everything from the causes of the Indian diaspora (bragging relatives are involved) to levels of corruption in India and, as a corollary, why India is so good at producing runners: “Primarily because the infrastructure required was legs. And ground.” And neither sell well.
Late Junction
Radio 3, 11pm
In a programme earlier in the week, Radio 3 was fretting about what had happened to the avant-garde. Was it gone as a genre, subsumed by rampant crass commerciality? Might one tentatively suggest that, at least on this frequency, the genre seems to be alive and well? This programme, for instance, presented by Fiona Talkington, involves the creation of a piece of music that will be based on a text by the poet Ross Sutherland. Sutherland, we learn, rewrites classic stories “using an Oulipian writing technique in which every noun and verb gets nudged a certain number of places along in the dictionary”. Naturally.