Viewing guide, by Joe Clay
Top of the Lake: China Girl
BBC Two, 9pm
The second series of Jane Campion’s haunting murder-mystery is unique for being the first drama to be made available to watch in its entirety on iPlayer before it has all been shown on television. This is the BBC trying to keep up with the public’s taste for binge-watching, but it’s a peculiar choice to serve in this way. Gorging on this frequently grim and downbeat offering would be like stuffing your face with andouillette (the pungent French pig-colon sausage) — you could do it, but you probably wouldn’t want to. Top of the Lake is excellent, but best consumed in small doses; you need time to digest (and recover from) the events portrayed on screen. In last week’s opener we discovered that Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) had a failed engagement behind her and tonight we find out why, in a sequence that culminates with Robin’s wedding dress being burnt on a ceremonial pyre. No wonder she’s so gloomy. The action cuts to Robin four weeks later, in her element on Bondi Beach, in Sydney photographing the corpse of the Asian girl in the suitcase. The ensuing graphic autopsy of “China Girl” is not for the squeamish. “You are enlivened by dead matter,” says the kindly yet peculiar pathologist Ray. “Where’s your loved one?” Robin replies: “Lying, promising, f***ing up. Believe it or not, I’m happy.” Depressingly believable groups of spectacularly misogynistic men are everywhere, from the Silicon Valley rejects in the café to Robin’s co-workers, one of whom hits on her at the crime scene. Thank heavens, then, for Gwendoline Christie as Robin’s gawky fan-girl partner, Miranda, injecting an element of odd-couple humour into proceedings.
10 Puppies and Us
BBC Two, 8pm
Alex and Emily Vaughan live in leafy Surrey with their three children, who are, according to Alex, “at the noisy age . . . They’re just energetic, running around, shouting, screaming.” The couple obviously have a masochistic streak because they are welcoming a puppy into the mix. Poppy is a bouncy eight-week-old cocker spaniel that the Vaughans’ youngest daughter delights in dressing up. The second part of this enjoyable series charting puppies and their families through their first six months together follows the Vaughans as they get to grips with the newest family member (and vice versa).
Who Do You Think You Are?
BBC One, 9pm
The Big Brother presenter Emma Willis is a proud Brummie. She is hoping to discover that her Birmingham roots run deep, and her wish is granted with the discovery that her three times great-grandfather James Gretton, a “horn and hair merchant” of Victorian Britain, was born and bred in the city Willis loves so much and was one of the entrepreneurs who gave Birmingham its nickname of “the city of a thousand trades”. There is less pride in the second family member Willis investigates, as a journey to Ireland uncovers a distant relative referred to in a newspaper as “a notorious informer and a murderous Orangeman”.
Inside London Fire Brigade
ITV, 9pm
Another dose of real-life drama begins with about a hundred firefighters mobilised to tackle a fire at a garden centre near Heathrow. The situation worsens when it’s discovered that there are a large number of explosive gas canisters on the site, directly in the path of the rapidly spreading fire. Elsewhere it’s water that is causing problems as the fire brigade tackles an enormous flood in Stoke Newington, north London. There’s also an indication of how stretched the emergency services are when firefighters attending the scene of a serious road traffic accident wait four hours for an ambulance to arrive.
Advertisement
Prejudice and Pride: The People’s History of LGBTQ Britain
BBC Four, 9pm
Tonight’s second helping of LGBTQ history as told through memorabilia reveals how pop culture moved it into the mainstream. There’s a reading from Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, which was dubbed “the sickest school book in Britain” on its publication in 1983, and a 1989 programme for a night at the theatre celebrating gay culture, in which Stephen Fry and Alan Bennett came out. The man who wrote the lesbian kiss scene in Brookside in 1994 shows off a photo of him and Anna Friel, and there’s a delightful trans-woman whose entire flat is modelled on the 1990s gay nightclub Trade.
Catch-up TV, by Chris Bennion
Is Love Racist? The Dating Game
channel4.com
“Love isn’t blind,” claims Emma Dabiri’s exploration of modern dating, “it’s racist.” And while that statement might sound alarmist, her documentary uncovers some troubling truths. It asks if dating apps and websites are making us more racist because 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 . . .
Film choice, by Wendy Ide
Bridge to Terabithia (PG, 2007)
Film4, 2.50pm
Using Katherine Paterson’s 1977 children’s novel of the same name as a basis, the Hungarian director Gábor Csupó has created a family film with heart and imagination, two elements that have seemingly become the preserve of animated films. Leslie (AnnaSophia Robb) and Jess (Josh Hutcherson) are misfit 12-year-olds who conjure up a vibrant imaginary kingdom — Terabithia — as a way of handling school bullies and distant parents. The journey they go on is hardly revelatory, but the fantasy sequences are neatly done, the young performers excel and the ending packs an emotional wallop. (93min) Chris Bennion
Advertisement
Miller’s Crossing (15, 1990)
Sky Cinema Select, 8pm
The third film from Joel and Ethan Coen is still arguably one of their best. It’s a stylish genre homage that pays tribute to Depression-era gangster movies. Gabriel Byrne plays the film’s antihero, an Irish enforcer who is caught between an escalating war between two rival crime syndicates: the Irish mob and the Italian mob. The film looks stunning, courtesy of the cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, who also provided the inspiration for John Turturro’s performance in the film as the bookie Bernie Bernbaum. There are memorable turns too from Albert Finney, Marcia Gay Harden and JE Freeman. (110min)
Taken 2 (15, 2012)
Film4, 9pm
Nobody has had worse luck with their holidays than the Mills family. In the first instalment of this action franchise the retired CIA agent Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) had to dig into his “specific set of skills” to rescue his daughter from Albanian human traffickers in Paris. Now he’s back for a sequel and another European vacation. This time Bryan is travelling with his daughter and his former wife, and the destination is Istanbul. But Albanian human traffickers are everywhere in Europe, and now they have an axe to grind: the father of one of the men that Bryan killed in the previous movie takes the whole Mills family hostage. Sure, it shamelessly recycles the first film, but Neeson is great as the one-man execution squad. (95min)
Radio choice, by Joe Clay
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
Radio 4, 11.30am
The “reformed” comedian Natalie Haynes returns for four more episodes of the series in which she profiles figures from ancient Greece or Rome and creates stand-up routines around them. First it’s the lesbian poet Sappho, who is more myth than woman so little is known about her. She was, probably, an aristocrat from the troubled Aegean island of Lesbos who wrote tense, vividly erotic poetry about men and women in the years around 600BC. Most of her poetry didn’t survive her — only two complete poems and a bunch of fragments are in existence. Not a great deal of material for Haynes to get half an hour of amusing and engaging radio out of, but she does an excellent job, aided by the classicist Professor Edith Hall, the writer Stella Duffy and the band Little Machine, who have set Sappho’s poetry to music.
Assignment: Last Call for Aleppo
World Service, 1.30pm
On December 14, 2016 the BBC correspondent Mike Thomson woke to a desperate voicemail message from Oum Modar, a frightened mother of three in besieged east Aleppo. Modar, a head teacher, had been in regular contact with Thomson and was pleading for his help as Syrian government forces closed in on the rebel-held area where she lived. That was the last Thomson heard from her for months, but then, out of the blue, he received a two-line text that revealed Modar’s fate and took him on a journey to the Syrian border.