For full TV listings for the week, see our comprehensive TV guide
Viewing guide, by James Jackson
Those About to Die
Prime Video
Merely the mention that Anthony Hopkins is in the latest Roman TV epic piques one’s interest in it. And rightly so, because he’s often the best thing about Those About to Die, offering his craggy gravitas to all the swords-and-sandals politics and violence, the lashings of sex, the daggers held threateningly to throats. Hopkins is Emperor Vespasian, who is ruling in 79AD having prevailed during the Year of Five Emperors when civil war raged (this was after Nero’s suicide). It’s also, as we’re told, when “Rome, once the beacon of civilisation is now a cesspool of corruption and decay — its citizens only interested in two things: bread … and games”. We’re not talking chess either. Indeed, aside from Hopkins’s presence, the big draw here is the chariot racing and gladiators at the Flavian amphitheatre (the series is based on the same 1958 book that inspired Ridley Scott’s Gladiator). So while we delve into the viperous mutterings within Vespasian’s court — and follow the dilemmas of his two sons: the heroic general Titus and the ruthless Domitian — their world collides with that of Tenax (Iwan Rheon), the owner of the most profitable betting joint in Rome. Stick with all this through the first half-hour of oddly artificial scene-setting, introducing the various characters (including some large CGI lions), and you arrive at the series’ big draw: spectacular Ben Hur-style blood and sport in front of the lofty emperor and a baying mob of thousands. That’s when Roland Emmerich’s ten-parter finds its feet, or rather galloping hooves.
Lady of the Lake
AppleTV+
Nothing to do with Arthurian legend, this stylish new drama is actually set in 1966 Baltimore, a city gripped by the disappearance of a young girl. Two storylines intertwine: that of the Jewish housewife Maddie (Natalie Portman), and of Cleo, a struggling mum (Moses Ingram). When Cleo turns up dead, Maddie turns sleuth. The series lives up to its billing as a “feverish noir thriller” with themes of racism and misogyny. Portman’s barnstorming performance is almost as vivid as the 1960s city, recreated in impeccably immersive fashion.
• Read our full Lady of the Lake review
First Night of the Proms
BBC2, 7pm
As is the way with the Proms in recent years, the 2024 season finds ways to move in new directions: in Prom 2 the BBC Concert Orchestra goes disco (July 20), Prom 8 will be a celebration of Nick Drake (July 24) and Sam Smith will offer his plaintive warble for Prom 18 (Aug 2). But for the First Night, it’s classic Henry Wood, kicked off by Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks overture, then taking in Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, performed by Isata Kanneh-Mason, before the climax: Beethoven’s Symphony No 5, full of musical fireworks and romance.
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• Proms conductor Elim Chan: ‘Thank God I grew up in a British Hong Kong’
Champions: Full Gallop
ITV1, 9pm
Hot on the hooves of BBC4’s Horsepower, here’s another series going behind the scenes with jockeys, trainers and owners as they navigate the 2023-24 jumps season. It’s a mix of modest riders jostling with charismatic owners, of salt-of-the-earth syndicates with the landed gentry, and the first episodes feature Paul Nicholls, the “Alex Ferguson of trainers”. The series has exclusive access to several other well-known horsemen as it takes us inside the stables, weighing rooms and the races where millions is at stake. Unmissable for racing fans.
Terror at 30,000 Feet
Channel 5, 9pm
“We’re all going to die now Mum …” It’s 5am on a flight from Gatwick to Kenya and a dream holiday has turned into a nightmare: a British Airways jumbo is plummeting towards the ground. There is less than a minute before it crashes. As it turns out, a passenger has entered the cockpit and is wrestling the pilots, pushing the plane into a dive. This is the horrifying story of BA Flight 2069, told by those on board, including crew and passengers (although not Bryan Ferry or Jemima Goldsmith, who happened to be in first class). Not ideal as pre-holiday viewing.
Catch-up TV, by James Jackson
Brats
Disney+
Those Generation Xers of a certain age will remember the 1980s Brat Pack. For a while the names Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy and Andrew McCarthy were the most cherished in Hollywood. Films such as The Breakfast Club, St Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink were instant teenage classics. What was it like to be one of those stars who burnt suddenly so brightly? McCarthy — the lovelorn one in St Elmo’s Fire, the preppy one in Pretty in Pink — wants to explore the complicated truth of this. He remains conflicted about the term “Brat Pack”, coined by a New York journalist in a 1985 magazine cover story with Estevez, and so do some of his former comrades. The actors may have mixed feelings, but hearing them talk about the era promises to be fascinating as a kind of celebrity-culture anthropology.
Film choice, by Kevin Maher
Mean Girls (12, 2024)
Sky Cinema Premiere/Now, 12.35pm/8pm
Tina Fey’s original high school comedy, a knotty parable about rivalry in female friendships, is defanged here as a syrupy singalong. The tunes come from Fey’s Broadway adaptation and chime with new messaging about how all feelings are “valid”, how “just being me” is the pinnacle of human achievement and, crucially, how “calling someone stupid won’t make you any smarter”. So, not mean at all. The premise is the same: a newbie student Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) moves to the Midwest and finds herself torn between Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and her “Plastics” and Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), who are witty, clever and gender nonconforming. The problem is that the Plastics are no longer mean, Janis and Damian are virtuous ciphers and the songs, by the composer Jeff Richmond (Fey’s husband) and the lyricist Nell Benjamin, are mostly meh. (112min)
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Mulholland Drive (15, 2001)
Film4, 12.45am
David Lynch’s madness-saturated mystery begins with a beautiful woman flung out of a black car on Mulholland Drive just before a crash. Bruised and exhausted, the woman (Laura Harring) creeps into an empty apartment. Meanwhile, Betty (Naomi Watts), a wide-eyed ingenue intent on making her fortune in Hollywood, arrives at the same apartment. She soon discovers that the mysterious stranger, who is calling herself Rita, has amnesia — and $125,000 in her purse, along with a strange blue key. Lynch plays with double identities, woozy cinematography and Möbius-strip narrative strands. Dreams — both ambitious and nightmarish — are the essence of this satire on the evils of Hollywood. (147min) Kate Muir
Radio choice, by Ben Dowell
CrowdScience
World Service, 8.30pm
When a listener called Siobhan passed a huge apartment block with tiny windows she was reminded of a prison. She wrote to the programme which led to this illuminating discussion of the feeling that the built word can inspire in us. It’s an important and often overlooked subject. Do architects pursue their own ego-centric vision without considering how buildings make us feel? Apparently a new field of neuroscience is asking this very question and one which the presenter Caroline Steel explores with leading experts. Trouper that she is, Steel has electrodes stuck to her head in an attempt to measure her emotional response to various built environments.
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