Viewing guide, by Chris Bennion
Nadiya’s British Food Adventure
BBC Two, 8.30pm
How quickly can someone become a national treasure? For Nadiya Hussain it happened sometime between episodes five and ten of The Great British Bake Off in 2015. Even before she claimed the crown with her “Big Fat British Wedding Cake” in the final — and then cracked stiff upper lips everywhere with her tearful “I can and I will” speech — Nadiya had become a firm favourite thanks to her wonderfully expressive face and her general exuberance. Since then she has appeared on Desert Island Discs, baked a cake for the Queen’s 90th birthday and fronted her own show, The Chronicles of Nadiya. For many she epitomises the best of multicultural Britain and is saluted for being Britain’s first bona fide headscarf-wearing heroine. This, however, is her first big test — a simple, common-or-garden cookery show that is all about her. Does Nadiya have what it takes to ensure her first name one day trips off the tongue à la Delia and Nigella? On this evidence, she does — she is less overtly sensuous than Nigella Lawson, less exacting than Delia Smith, but she has her own undeniably Nadiya-esque charms. In this series she will be travelling around the country celebrating the best of British grub, and the Luton girl begins in her own backyard, the home counties. She pops off to Oxfordshire to inspect asparagus, meets a fireman turned food-smoker in Milton Keynes and creates an Eton Mess cheesecake that could rot your teeth just by looking at it. It is Nadiya’s wry, self-deprecating humour that sets her apart from the other kitchen goddesses — sitting, legs astride a motorised asparagus picker, she snorts: “It takes me back to childbirth!” You wouldn’t get Nigella on one of those.
Game of Thrones
Sky Atlantic, 9pm
George RR Martin’s fantasy epic has always been a vast, sprawling thing — keeping tabs on various characters requires Sherlock-esque feats of memory — but, as the seventh, and penultimate, season begins, events are relatively straightforward. Jon Snow has galvanised the North, Cersei Lannister has throttled the South into submission, while Daenerys Targaryen is heading to Westeros to clobber them both with her dragons and her gargantuan army. All of which is a trifle compared to what’s coming for them all from the frozen wastes beyond the Wall — namely the White Walkers, who care not for plot or characterisation. Strap in.
Normal for Norfolk
BBC Two, 10pm
Desmond MacCarthy is back — as is his crumbling manor house, his centenarian mother and his unfathomable eyebrows. The cameras have returned to Wiveton Hall for another series of wilful eccentricity in the company of the jolly gentleman farmer and his many, many financial woes. Desmond’s latest whizzo plans to keep the old place afloat include opening up a derelict wing for hire (“Oh my GOD,” he says, a lot, while inspecting it), personal tours of the grounds and holding a yoga retreat. “I don’t know much about yoga,” MacCarthy admits. “I think they like cosmic smells, produced by ethnic candles. Yes.”
Is Love Racist? The Dating Game
Channel 4, 10pm
“Love isn’t blind,” claims Emma Dabiri’s exploration of modern dating, “it’s racist.” And while that statement might sound a little alarmist, her documentary uncovers some troubling truths. Asking if dating apps and websites are making us more racist — most of them allow us to search for partners based on everything from height and weight, to salary and skin colour — Dabiri uses the UK’s first extensive survey on race and dating, as well as a series of experiments with some single guinea pigs, to uncover the “white bias” in our society. And what matters in the bedroom, matters in the boardroom . . .
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The Great European Cigarette Scandal
BBC Four, 10pm
What’s the EU ever done for us? Well, it provided this vastly entertaining story for one. In 2012 the Maltese politician John Dalli left his post as the EU commissioner of health after being embroiled in a scandal involving Big Tobacco — it was alleged that one of Dalli’s associates asked a tobacco company for a €60 million bribe. The Danish film-makers Mads Brügger and Mikael Bertelsen headed to Malta to try to get to the bottom of this mystery and ended up stumbling on an even bigger one. And this one involved secret sources, dodgy documents and assassination plots.
Catch-up TV, by Joe Clay
Oink: Man Loves Pig — Storyville
BBC iPlayer, to August 1
Angus Macqueen’s thought-provoking film explores our relationship with the pig. Divided into eight chapters, with headings such as Home, School and Death, it is at times deep and meditative, but also brilliantly bonkers, with segments narrated by a saddleback pig called Dorothy. The opening sequence features a pig being slaughtered in China — Macqueen’s early warning that this is no film for vegetarians. The action jumps from China to Wiltshire via Brooklyn; from cute piglets frolicking on the farm to rows of pig carcasses hanging from meat hooks in an abattoir and bacon sizzling in a pan. Pigs, we discover, are clean, fiercely intelligent animals — but also delicious.
Film choice, by Wendy Ide
The Drop (15, 2014)
Film4, 9pm
In this dour, blue-collar crime drama, James Gandolfini — in one of his final roles — is Cousin Marv, working for a Chechen gang in the bar he used to own and still bears his name. The bar is part of a rotating circuit used by the local crime syndicates as a holding area for ill-gotten gains. Working alongside Marv is his cousin Bob (Tom Hardy), a terse man whose simplicity tends to make people underestimate him. Bob’s routine life changes when he finds a badly beaten pitbull puppy in a dustbin, bringing him into contact with Nadia (Noomi Rapace), a former addict, and her ex-boyfriend, who claims ownership of the puppy. While the material and milieu have been ploughed before, the film is elevated by great writing and the unexpected climax. (106min)
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Lawless (18, 2012)
Film4, 11.10pm
Adapted from a screenplay by the director John Hillcoat’s occasional collaborator Nick Cave, this is a conventional but not unwatchable action film. In Franklin, Virginia, in 1931, three brothers in the moonshine business have developed a fearsome mythology that precedes them in their dealings with customers for their rotgut hooch. The Bondurant brothers — played by Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke and Shia LaBeouf — are said to be unkillable. This seems remarkably well-groomed for a story about bootleg-brewing hillbillies who are involved in a blood feud with the local law enforcement. If ever a movie called for a layer of authentic muck and misery, it’s this one. (116min)
Northwest (15, 2013)
Film4, 1.25am
A talented thief, who lives with his mother, little sister and impressionable younger brother in the tough Copenhagen district of Northwest, decides to climb up the criminal food chain, but finds himself between the front lines of a turf war. He starts to work with the local big shot, Bjorn, incurring the wrath of his former employer, an unpredictable gangster called Jamal. This is the sort of story that can only ever end badly and, yes, there’s a certain grinding inevitability about this trawl through Denmark’s underworld. It shares a milieu with, but lacks the brutal dynamism of, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher. That said, the characters are persuasively grubby, with tough, scuffed-up performances to match. For those hooked on Scandi crime dramas. (91min)
Radio choice, by Catherine Nixey
Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight
Radio 4, 9.45am
“Spoken language is a blue sea. Everyone else is swimming, diving and frolicking freely while I am alone. Stuck in a tiny boat.” It’s a wonderful sentence from a wonderful and paradoxical book. Its author, Naoki Higashida, has severe non-verbal autism. He is a man who struggles so profoundly with language that, as David Mitchell his translator explains, he has learnt to communicate by typing out responses on an alphabet grid: a standard querty keyboard layout drawn on a piece of card with a some extra keys for “yes”, “no” and “finish”. And yet this “non-verbal” man writes with the purity of a poet; sentences so lovely, so thoughtful, so vivid that they take your breath away. His language isn’t perfect, admittedly. But then as Higashida says: “Who can capture every last sensation they ever feel in words alone?”
The Music Shop
Radio 4, 10.45pm
Rachel Joyce’s two previous novels were titled The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. This, then, is not a woman afraid of whimsy. And indeed, in this first episode of the adaptation of her new novel, we meet a record shop that contains a Father Anthony who is making an origami flower, and a man who insists on listening only to Chopin whose life is transformed when he hears Aretha Franklin. But if you don’t mind whimsy then this has some lovely moments.