Viewing guide, by James Jackson
BBC Proms 2017
BBC Four, 8pm
Traditionalists will always believe that film scores are an inferior form of classical music — just as Classic FM perpetually embraces them. The radio station certainly seems to consider the music of John Williams on a par with the great composers, or at least its listeners do, pushing him above Bach and Elgar in this year’s Easter Hall of Fame chart. Williams is the man behind the most memorable scores of the past five decades: the Star Wars series, Jaws, E.T., Schindler’s List, the Indiana Jones films (all but two of Steven Spielberg’s movies, in fact) and the first three Harry Potter movies, to name a few. He has made it clear that he is no frustrated concert composer, yet a populist Prom dedicated to his works seems not just reasonable, but irresistible. The rousing blasts of the Star Wars theme alone will be worth tuning in for (and let’s overlook that Williams recently suggested that his Star Wars scores were “not very memorable” — a remark that will baffle millions). Key to the main fanfare’s success was the bright, ringing trumpet of Maurice Murphy of the London Symphony Orchestra, but tonight it’s the BBC Concert Orchestra breathing life into the overture, along with excerpts from the rest of the Williams canon under the baton of Keith Lockhart from the Boston Pops Orchestra. One hopes that they will play the ominous Jaws theme. When Williams first played Spielberg that two-note intro the director thought he was joking. Spielberg later revised his opinion, saying that without Williams’s score the film would have been only half as successful.
Peter Kay’s Comedy Shuffle
BBC One, 9pm
Peter Kay never intended to play the wheelchair-using club boss Brian Potter in Phoenix Nights. He wrote the character with Bernard Manning in mind, but the late comedian became ill before Kay could sign him up. We’ll never know how that would have turned out, but in tonight’s lucky dip of classic Kay we get to see the character at his testy best as he starts receiving mysterious phone calls. There’s also an excerpt of Peter Kay’s Car Share, with John and Kayleigh discussing naturism, and an appearance by Amy Winehouse.
It’s So Easy and Other Lies
Sky Arts, 9pm
Axl Rose and Slash may be the cartoonish icons of the heavy-rock titans Guns N’ Roses, but Duff McKagan, the bassist, also has a rollercoaster story and a more refined way with self-mythology. Reading extracts from his biography, backed by a mellow country band in suits, he recalls his Seattle punk days and the Guns N’ Roses infamy that followed. There’s the alcoholism that resulted in his pancreas exploding, a redemptive marriage and pill-popping relapses. Aside from the several hundred expletives, it’s all oddly tasteful.
The Last Leg
Channel 4, 10pm
The engagingly loose and unselfconscious satirical comedy is serving as a companion show to the World Para Athletics. It is surely the only TV show in the world that succeeds by taking the mickey out of the disabled (something it can get away with only because two of its presenters are disabled). Tonight the swimming champion Ellie Simmonds joins the double gold medal-winners Jonnie Peacock and Liam Malone live in the studio. As usual the humour will run near the knuckle, while, crucially, never being mean-spirited.
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Reginald D Hunter’s Songs of the South: Tennessee & Kentucky
BBC Four, 10pm
“When you’re thinking about American music, you’re really thinking about the south,” says Hunter in his deep drawl at the start of his three-part 2015 series, repeated from tonight. Hunter, who was born in Georgia, begins his journey into blues, soul, jazz and rock’n’roll in Tennessee and Kentucky, getting plastered on moonshine in Gatlinburg along the way and hearing from Dolly Parton, the self-styled “Queen of the Hillbillies”. It’s a fine musical travelogue.
Joe Clay
Catch-up TV
Broken
BBC iPlayer, to August 3
Sean Bean has never been better than in Jimmy McGovern’s uncompromising state-of-the-nation drama series. Bean plays Father Michael Kerrigan, a decent but damaged priest in the northwest of England who wrestles with his faith as well as the shattered lives of his impoverished parishioners. Anna Friel and Paula Malcomson excel as church members in dire need of guidance, but it is Bean, his face whitewashed and crumpled with the weight of the sorrows he must bear without complaint, who makes the drama unmissable. McGovern’s portrait of the Catholic Church is neither romanticised nor damning — rather, Broken is a paean to decency, humanity and kindness. A Bafta for Bean is a must.
Chris Bennion
Film choice
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (12, 2016)
Sky Cinema Premiere, 8pm
X-Men meets Groundhog Day meets something quaint and English in a family film that contains moments of greatness. It is based on the young-adult bestseller by Ransom Riggs and directed by Tim Burton, and it tells the story of a lonely teenager named Jake (Asa Butterfield) who stumbles into the magical world of Miss Peregrine (Eva Green). A gorgeous, half-human, half-bird-of-prey time traveller, she runs a boarding school for supernatural children, aka “peculiars”. Chief among the sassy, pipe-smoking Peregrine’s charges are Lauren McCrostie’s Olive (she can control fire), Hayden Keeler-Stone’s Horace (he can project his dreams through his eyes) and Ella Purnell’s Emma (she can manipulate air). The peculiars share a secret: they are immortal, yet trapped, living for ever in a single day (September 3, 1943), while battling the forces of evil. (127min)
Kevin Maher
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Sexy Beast (18, 2000)
Film4, 10.40pm
Just when you thought you couldn’t take another generic British gangster movie, along came the debut feature film from Jonathan Glazer. Ray Winstone is suitably sun-baked as Gary, a former gangster who has retired to rural Spain. His peaceful existence is interrupted by Ben Kingsley, delivering a huge, scene-stealing performance as Gary’s former colleague Don Logan. Don is planning a bank job and he needs Gary on his team. He is not a man who takes no for an answer. Kingsley is magnificent, a ball of sociopathic malice. It’s his nerve-shredding turn that elevates a good film to a great one. (98min)
Wendy Ide
Young Adult (15, 2011)
Channel 4, 1.20am
The Juno dream team of the writer Diablo Cody and the director Jason Reitman reunite for this blistering black comedy. Charlize Theron is impressive as the self-absorbed and thoroughly unlikeable central character in a script of such elaborate and meticulous cruelty, it’s like watching someone slowly pulling the legs off a spider. Theron deploys a curled lip and plenty of cut-eye as Mavis, a writer of teenage fiction on the rebound after a divorce, gradually revealing her insecurities and self-hatred. She has fixated on her high-school sweetheart as her one missed chance of fulfilment. The fact that he’s happily married and the father of a new baby matters not a bit. The script is perceptively savage, the humour is the kind that cuts. (94min)
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Radio choice, by Catherine Nixey
And Then There Were Nun
Radio 4, 11am
The title of this programme summons the ghost of Agatha Christie’s most famous short story. In it, Christie took the children’s rhyme Ten Little Soldiers as the basis for a series of murders in which ten people were gathered on an island, then picked off, one by one, until there was none left. The torture for those who had not yet died was partly wondering who would be next — but also the isolation. It’s an unpleasantly apt title for this programme about religious communities in Britain. These ageing groups are, slowly — literally — dying out. My father was a monk for more than a decade. Each morning the monks processed in order of age up the monastery chapel. With each death, they moved one place closer to the front of that procession. It was a dispiriting reminder of what lay in store. He left. Here, members of monastic communities who stayed reminisce about life behind monastery walls.
CrowdScience: Could a Computer Judge My Crime?
World Service, 8.30pm
The simple answer to the above question appears to be: yes, it could. And sooner than you might think too. Uganda is suffering (if that is the word) from a shortage of lawyers, so instead has started to use technology and social media to fill the gap. Which, although it sounds daunting in many ways, does also sound cheap. Here, Marnie Chesterton travels to Uganda and London and discovers that one simple algorithm can out-perform humans in making bail decisions.