For full TV listings for the week, see thetimes.co.uk/tvplanner
Viewing guide, by Alexi Duggins
Escobar by Escobar
Sky Documentaries/Now, 9pm
This gripping new documentary series lets Pablo Escobar tell his life story. The Escobar in question isn’t, however, the one-time leader of the Colombian Medellin cartel. It’s his son, Juan Pablo. He was only 14 when his father’s criminal career ended, but it’s not long before his tale is revealed as being every bit as fascinating and danger-packed as his father’s. The story starts with Escobar senior agreeing to surrender and entering La Catedral, the prison he built for himself. Yet this brief moment of calm soon ends, as Juan Pablo recounts seeing the prison lights flicker off as his father fled justice. Terrifying archive news footage vividly brings Juan Pablo and his family’s scary existence to life. We see the machine-gun drills of Los Pepes, the vigilante group formed to hunt down Escobar and his associates. Grisly photos display corpses on top of which are wooden boards etched with the phrase: “Killed by Los Pepes for helping Pablo Escobar.” There’s shaky camerawork of Juan Pablo and his family fleeing from an airport in a helicopter after officials have stopped them boarding a plane out of the country while a 30-strong troop of masked assassins gather outside in wait. At one point we see photographs of the devastation caused by a lorry bomb that exploded outside the flat his family were hiding in, blowing out so many windows that the repairs caused a city-wide glass shortage. “We had no optimism for the future. We saw dark, all black in front of us,” Juan Pablo says in one of the many revealing interviews that intersperse the archival footage. This captivating documentary series makes it very easy to see why.
Mr Corman
Apple TV+
A midlife crisis looms for the titular schoolteacher in this quietly comedic new series. Joseph Gordon-Levitt writes, directs and stars, showcasing his versatile acting chops. He veers brilliantly from an affable and smiley educator to a glazed and maudlin presence who eyeballs lottery tickets in convenience shops. Will Corman carry on with a life where he struggles to imagine a single non-sofa-bound way to spend a Friday night? Or will he return to his dreams of being a musician? Either way, it should be well within Levitt’s impressive range.
BBC Proms
BBC4, 7pm
This year’s Proms are about the theme of musical borrowings, reworkings and reinventions. Tonight we have the National Orchestra of Wales’s contribution to the concept, as it performs a programme that has as a throughline a piece from a Bach cantata. There’s a performance of Dido’s Lament from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, the bassline of which echoes Bach’s repeating patterns. There’s also Brahms’s Symphony No 4 as well as the American composer Elizabeth Ogonek’s Cloudline, which it inspired. It’s led by Elim Chan, the chief conductor of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra.
Epic Wales: Valleys, Mountains and Coasts
Channel 4, 8pm
If you ever needed a masterclass in the value of a great voiceover, you could do a lot worse than this peek into Wales’s beautiful landscapes. As the camera pans across Snowdonia’s wild crags and its crashing, spume-filled seas, Cerys Matthews — who else? — delivers a breathy, dewy-eyed narration that wouldn’t sound out of place on a tourist board ad. Her enthusiasm hugely lifts meetings with sheep farmers, fishermen and the abseiling repairmen of historic castles. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine this being much less enjoyable as a purely audio experience.
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Motorhoming with Merton & Webster
Channel 5, 8pm
Seventy million people will holiday in a motorhome this year, according to this travelogue. Hence Paul Merton and his wife Suki Webster’s first trial of a four-wheeled house in this low-energy tour of Kent. Think light tension over how to brew the morning coffee and the occasional clattering of wing mirrors against the side of narrow country lanes. It’s interspersed with motorhome-based trivia, such as a tour of a £650,000 behemoth that can fit a car in its boot and has heated seats.
Catch-up TV, by Joe Clay
Case Histories
Britbox
Jason Isaacs played the brooding, chain-smoking private investigator Jackson Brodie in two series of the crime drama adapted from the novels by Kate Atkinson. Brodie is a former soldier and police officer who has set himself up as a private investigator in Edinburgh. The overriding strength of the series is that Brodie is a complex and difficult man to pin down. He rarely gets angry, opting instead to brood and listen to mournful music. Like most TV detectives, he has his own demons with which to contend. In his first case, a seemingly innocuous task (helping a regular client to find her cat) takes a peculiar turn when two sisters plead with him to find their sister, who went missing 30 years previously.
Film choice
The Deer Hunter (18, 1978)
BBC2, 11.05pm
Michael Cimino’s stirring portrait of male friendship and the war-bruised sensibility of America during the mid-1970s is perhaps a little cumbersome, but it’s hard not to get caught up in the film’s big, sentimental sweep. Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage and John Cazale star as four blue-collar hunting buddies who end up fighting in Vietnam. The movie is as ambitious as it is harrowing — the effect of conflict on the men’s psyche is devastating. It is not without flaws, but it’s an impressive achievement nonetheless and the Russian roulette scene is still compelling. Yet, more than 40 years on, it’s the friends’ closeness and clashes that leave the biggest sting. It’s most famous for its haunting theme by John Williams. (184min) Wendy Ide
Everybody Wants Some!! (15, 2016)
Film4, 1.30am
The “some” in the title refers to “the wonderful world of college pussy”, to employ the language of the characters, who are all baseball jocks at a Texan university. This is a frat-house movie, written and directed by Richard Linklater (Boyhood), a man whose dialogue is usually known for its insight, sensitivity and naturalism. The story takes place in 1980 in the three days before term starts as the baseball players congregate at two white-pillared campus frat houses and jockey for superiority over the freshmen. Clean-cut, stripy T-shirted Jake (Blake Jenner, once of Glee) is the central freshman and resembles the young Linklater. There is something delightfully carefree about the way the movie just rolls around campus with its characters, reflecting those college days. It’s a shaggy dog movie, with extra shagging. (112min) Kevin Maher
Radio choice, by Debra Craine
CrowdScience
BBC World Service, 8.30pm
Video games are amazingly popular — it’s estimated that about three billion people round the world play them, whether it’s a simple puzzle on a phone or a virtual battleground on a games console. And during the pandemic chances are that we have been playing games more than ever. Yet what are they doing to our brains? Do they affect our behaviour or thought patterns? Can they make us smarter or just more addicted? And what about the link with violence? Alex Lathbridge speaks to psychologists, neuroscientists, doctors and games designers about the power of video games to change us — for better or worse.