Viewing guide, by Joe Clay
Ackley Bridge
Channel 4, 8pm
Since the demise of Brookside in 2003, Channel 4 has been looking for a drama to fill the early night slot. Piers Wenger, the head of drama at Channel 4, is hopeful that this new series, set in a west Yorkshire mill town and following the lives of the teachers, pupils and parents of a multicultural school, will make the grade — although if it is successful, its future is as a recurring annual series, not a weekly soap. As a drama, it is very much of our times. Previously the Asian and white communities of Ackley Bridge had rarely mixed; it is, as the head teacher Mandy Carter (Jo Joyner) says, “one of the most divided communities in the UK”, where “whites and Asians live side by side, but in totally different worlds”. Now the two segregated comprehensive schools have been forced to merge into one academy (Ackley Bridge College) because of budget cuts, and lives and cultures collide, with all the conflict and high drama that entails. Even picking players for the football team is fraught. There are plenty of familiar faces from the world of soap — alongside Joyner, Paul Nicholls plays the PE teacher Steve Bell, Mandy’s husband, while Sunetra Sarker is Kaneez Paracha, a dinner lady and busy mum. Adil Ray (Citizen Khan) plays Sadiq Nawaz, a successful businessman and the sponsor of the academy. The younger actors are excellent, especially Poppy Lee Friar and Amy-Leigh Hickman as “bezzies” Missy and Nas. One thing is certain — it isn’t afraid of tackling difficult issues, albeit via the glossy, heightened soap-opera format. This opening episode originally contained a bomb hoax scene, which Channel 4 bosses decided to cut after the recent attack in Manchester.
Horizon: Antarctica Ice Station Rescue
BBC Two, 9pm
Antarctica is a challenging place to build a research centre. With five bases having already failed to cope with conditions, Halley VI is now in trouble — the ice on which it sits is breaking apart, threatening to set the £28 million base adrift on an iceberg. However, Halley VI was built on giant skis, so it can be moved — in theory. However, no one has attempted anything like this before. The BBC film-maker Natalie Hewit spent three months following the team battling extreme conditions to move Britain’s vital polar research station.
Into the Forbidden Zone
National Geographic, 9pm
In November 2000 National Geographic sent to Afghanistan Sebastian Junger, a seasoned American journalist known for writing the bestselling book on which the Hollywood movie The Perfect Storm was based. His mission was to profile Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Afghan resistance fighting the Taliban. Smuggled into the country by helicopter through Taliban-controlled airspace, Junger produced a film that provided a gripping, visceral portrait of a conflict that, after 9/11, would be permanently imprinted on the American psyche. It is being shown on British television for the first time tonight.
Fargo
Channel 4, 10pm
The latest incarnation of Noah Hawley’s idiosyncratic drama continues and the key thrust of the narrative is the war between the brothers Emmit and Ray Stussy (both played by Ewan McGregor). However, it is Ray’s fiancée, Nikki Swango (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who raises the bar in the conflict, bringing a whole new meaning to the term “blood feud”. Setting it in 2010 allows Hawley to poke fun at the simple Minnesota folk and their Luddite tendencies. David Thewlis and those terrible prosthetic teeth steal the show again, but McGregor is excellent, making the brothers feel like distinct people.
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Catch-up TV, by Chris Bennion
Horizon: Space Volcanoes
BBC iPlayer, to June 22
Space Volcanoes sounds like one of those mash-up children’s books that are popular these days — pirate dinosaurs, that sort of thing. However, space exploration has helped us to understand that there are planets and moons in the solar system with active volcanoes. The documentary tells us that one moon of Jupiter, Io, has more than 400, while Earth has a mere 60. What’s more, our volcanoes pale into insignificance compared with the largest in our solar system: Olympus Mons on Mars. It is about 25km high (almost three times the height of Everest) and has a base that is nearly the size of France. Take that, Vesuvius. Jim Head, a professor at Brown University in the US, is part of a team of scientists researching these space volcanoes, which are the focus of this absorbing edition of Horizon.
Film choice, by Wendy Ide
Surrogates (12A, 2009)
Film4, 9pm
This dystopian science-fiction adventure received lukewarm reviews when it was released, but it is not a bad bet for fans of glossy, high-concept paranoia. It’s a handsomely mounted piece from the film-making team behind Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines — the director Jonathan Mostow and screenwriters Michael Ferris and John Brancato. The film imagines a world in which humans live in isolation, communicating through robot versions of themselves — social surrogates that are better-looking and altogether more polished than their human counterparts. Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell play FBI agents who may have to venture outside the safety of their homes to investigate the murder of the brilliant college student who invented the surrogates. It is intriguing, if not wholly satisfying. (89min)
Elizabeth: The Golden Age (12A, 2007)
ITV, 11.25pm
Pomp and pageantry fill every corner of every shot; pennants dance, lances rattle and soldiers creak in their newly forged armour. Each scene in Shekhar Kapur’s film is taut with high drama, every moment another condensed historical highlight. At the centre of it all, magnificent in her opulent gowns and regal even in her vanity, is Queen Elizabeth I, the role reprised impressively by Cate Blanchett. Gone is the gauche young woman who clattered unsteadily into court like a foal. In her place is a formidable stateswoman, a monarch with a cast-iron will. However, there is a chink in the armour — like every woman who took her beauty for granted, she’s beginning to realise that other, younger women outshine her. She eyes Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) appreciatively, but his attentions are elsewhere. (114min)
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Baaria (15, 2009)
Film4, 1am
The Cinema Paradiso director, Giuseppe Tornatore, returned with the epic, multigenerational Baaria (the title is the local name for a neighbourhood of Palermo). It is a vast, rambling scrapbook of memories populated by sepia-tinted generations of honest peasant folk, all of whom shout continuously, photographed with never-ending crane shots that swoop and weave drunkenly. It’s hugely ambitious, but at the same time curiously unfocused. At the heart of the film are three generations of one family, headed by Cicco, an impoverished shepherd who is renowned for his formidable teeth (he exercises them by threatening to bite local landowners). Tornatore dusts everything, from abject poverty to political unrest, with the same twinkly nostalgia, sweeping us along on a wave of farm animals, loveable urchins and broom-brandishing Sicilian grannies. (163min)
Radio choice, by Catherine Nixey
Tommies
Radio 4, 2.15pm
It wasn’t much fun to be a British signaller in German east Africa during the First World War. If the malaria and the hunger didn’t get you, the bees might have done. This is the latest in the series Tommies that, like its more plodding counterpart Home Front, is broadcast on the same day (albeit a hundred years on) as the day on which the action it describes happened. Unlike Home Front, it is based closely on real documentation and is all the more interesting for it. So much more atmospheric, and odd and absurd. So much more, in short, like life. In this episode (which, as always, has an excellent soundscape) the action is not about guns and men and bravery, as it would be if it were fiction, but about a slaughtered ox, tree bark — and bees. Listen out for the quite extraordinary scene set over the telephone.
The Compass: Where Are You Going?
World Service, 1.30pm
It is one of those simple ideas that the World Service specialises in. Stop someone who’s walking along, somewhere in the world, and ask them: “Where are you going?” Then record the answer. That’s it. That’s the programme. You wouldn’t want a ten-part series of that sort of whimsy, admittedly, but in small doses it is utterly wonderful. It has won awards and rightly so. In today’s programme, the presenter Catherine Carr meets a translator in Brussels who speaks Bulgarian, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, some Turkish and Japanese and who, as if that were not interesting enough, is gay, but married to a woman and has a teenage son.