Viewing guide, by James Jackson
Top of the Pops: The Story of 1984
BBC Four, 9pm
We’re not halfway through the year and BBC Four’s Top of the Pops repeats are already done and dusted with 1983, so it’s straight on to 1984, when the charts became more exultant, airily glossy, clubby and political. This retrospective takes the usual approach of casting the year’s pop in a wider context. Thatcherism was kicking in hard, defined by the violent clashes during the miners’ strike, and nuclear paranoia was high. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes, arguably the greatest hit about war, seemed right to take over the summer as No 1 for nine weeks, and it still looks and sounds thrilling in the clips here. The year was dominated by Frankie’s subversive propaganda machine. Members of the band and their producer, Trevor Horn, recall how champagne corks were popped in their office when Relax was dropped by the Radio 1 disc jockey Mike Read (he never “banned” it, he maintains here). Nothing like controversy for sending a single into “turbo-drive”, as Horn puts it. The hi-nrg sound from the gay clubs — cue period clips of cowboys with large moustaches in Heaven in London — had entered the mainstream. The 1984 pop parade also showed that one man and a keyboard (Howard Jones; Nik Kershaw) could take on Wham! and Duran Duran. And the year’s politicised pop was capped by Band Aid’s call to “feed the world” — you may have forgotten David Bowie’s filmed plea to people to buy the single. For those of a certain age, all this will prompt such nostalgia they’ll be dusting off their copy of Now That’s What I Call Music 3 straight after.
Question Time Leaders Special
BBC One, 8.30pm
Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn won’t go head-to-head tonight — the compromise deal struck between the prime minister and the BBC will instead have the two main party leaders face audience questions separately for 45 minutes in a session moderated by David Dimbleby. This is the same format as the 2015 show featuring David Cameron and Ed Miliband (only two years ago, but already those names sound as though from a distant era). Then, Miliband nearly fell off the stage, so Corbyn will be watching his step in more ways than one.
Jamestown
Sky1, 9pm
The earthy, very watchable period soap continues with all manner of intrigue in the 17th-century Virginia settlement. The snooty blonde Jocelyn (Naomi Battrick) is, as usual, at the centre. She’s out to prevent the baddies from seizing power of the colony, but — wouldn’t you know it — her homicidal past is about to catch up with her. The most memorable moment, however, is the surgical procedure carried out on the governor (Jason Flemyng). He has but a jug of spirits for pain relief, and you may want to take a swig of something strong yourself for this visceral scene.
Brian Johnson’s A Life on the Road
Sky Arts, 9pm
Robert Plant isn’t one for dishing the dirt on Led Zeppelin’s years as marauding rock gods. He has conceded before that their tours had little “decorum”, but here he simply says he can’t recall much about being at the centre of a “ball of fire”. If you want debauched details of mudsharks and groupies, read Hammer of the Gods instead, although writer Mick Wall turns up here to offer a bit of that kind of stuff. But Plant is on loose, entertaining form with interviewer Brian Johnson — turning up dressed in the viking outfit he wore in the 1976 Zep film The Song Remains the Same and cheekily telling the AC/DC singer, “if you want a job now, I can put in a good word for you!” Your thoughts, Mr Page?
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Hijacked
Channel 5, 10.30pm
Shortly after take-off on June 14, 1985, the Rome-bound TWA flight 847 was seized by two armed Lebanese members of Hezbollah. The passengers and crew, including the singer Demis Roussos, were about to endure a three-day ordeal across the Middle East and north Africa. They were threatened and beaten, and the horror culminated in a US Navy diver being killed and tossed on to the tarmac at Beirut airport. Once you’ve adjusted to the overheated style, this account of a hijacking that gripped the world gives you a sense of how terrifying it must have been for those unfortunate souls on board.
Catch-up TV, by James Jackson
Buddy Holly: Rave On
BBC iPlayer, to June 12
After Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly was surely the most influential rock’n’roll star of the 1950s. Yet, as Bob Harris reminds us at the start of this excellent rock documentary, it was less than 18 months between Holly topping the charts and his death in a plane crash in Iowa in 1959. How did a young man from Lubbock, Texas, who looked like a maths teacher revolutionise contemporary music in such a brief time? Interviews with those who knew and worked with him, along with fans from Dion to Duane Eddy, Brian May to Hank Marvin, offer insights into the way Holly and the Crickets introduced dynamic rhythms and unpredictable melodies into their three-minute marvels of pop.
Film choice
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (12, 2016)
Sky Cinema Premiere, 8pm
Tom Cruise does what Tom Cruise does best in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back — he races cars, delivers bone-crunching punches, leaps from roofs, busts government conspiracies, breaks out of prison, predicts when phones will ring and grinds his manly jaw. In the second Reacher thriller to be adapted from Lee Child’s books, loner Jack is on the road again, hitching his way across America beneath the radar, to see the woman with whom he is covertly working: Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), of the military police, his old army unit. Turns out she has been accused of espionage and is in a super-duper high-security military prison. Reacher smells a rat and soon he and Turner are on the run. From there the movie revs up and rarely relents. (118min) Kate Muir
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Sliding Doors (15, 1998)
BBC One, 11.25pm
The slightly gimmicky premise — two alternative realities in one woman’s life hinge on whether she catches a train — is carried along by one of Gwyneth Paltrow’s most likeable performances. She plays Helen, a trendy Londoner who is fired from her job in PR then in one strand gets home in time to catch her boyfriend cheating, and in another is mugged and continues to know nothing about his extracurricular bedroom activities. The director Peter Howitt deftly juggles the two stories with a playful lightness of touch that prevents the film getting bogged down by its narrative device. Support comes from John Hannah, John Lynch (as the double-crossing boyfriend) and Jeanne Tripplehorn. (95min) Wendy Ide
Spies Like Us (PG, 1985)
Channel 5, 3.10am
John Landis, Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase team up for a very Eighties take on the classic Road to . . . movies (eyes peeled for Bob Hope’s cameo). Aykroyd and Chase play a pair of bungling CIA pencil-pushers who are sent on a “special” mission to the Soviet Union when they are caught cheating on the foreign service exam. They think they are on an assignment of the highest importance; they are, of course, expendable decoys. No prizes for guessing what happens next. Everyone involved has done much better work, but there’s charm to this goofy Cold War farce. For reasons best known to Landis, there are umpteen cameos from fellow film directors, including Terry Gilliam, Sam Raimi, Joel Coen, Costa-Gavras, Frank Oz and Michael Apted. (100min) Chris Bennion
Radio choice, by Catherine Nixey
Short Works: Relic
Radio 4, 3.45pm
Jess Kidd won the Costa Short Story award last year and, listening to this, you can understand why. Her prose is wonderful. Here she is describing an island in the Atlantic: “For all its size, the island has a battened down, hunkered down, redoubtable look . . . like a bison staring down wild weather on some forsaken plain.” Or here again, describing how the tide has gone out, leaving barnacled and seaweedy rocks exposed “as if the sea has drawn back in distaste from a set of rotten teeth”. They are read by Tadhg Murphy, whose voice sounds as though it was fashioned by the weather on just such an Atlantic island, making a programme that is an utter treat for the ears. The plot is a bit more confusing, mind: but when confusion sounds this lovely, who cares?
CrowdScience: What’s the Oldest Living Thing?
World Service, 8.30pm
Nicholas Parsons perhaps? As it turns out, no one is quite sure what the oldest living thing is. It’s almost certainly a tree, but given that the only way to know for certain is to cut it down and count the rings, scientists are a trifle reluctant to investigate. Whatever this thing turns out to be, it’s also almost certainly older than you might think: while a bristlecone pine lived to be almost 5,000 years old, some trees live in colonies that survive for up to 80,000 years. Marnie Chesterton investigates.