Viewing guide, by Joe Clay
The Sweet Makers: A Tudor Treat
BBC Two, 8pm
Four modern confectioners have a rummage in ye olde fancy dress box and clamber aboard the BBC time machine as they are sent back to experience three eras that revolutionised their trade. They start at the birth of their profession four centuries ago, learning how to make the sweet treats of the past using the recipes and equipment of the time. They create sugary masterpieces, many of which haven’t been tasted for hundreds of years (not counting those Supersizers, Giles and Sue). The quartet are the sweet consultant Andy Baxendale, the wedding cake designer Cynthia Stroud, and the chocolatiers Diana Short and Paul A Young. However, 400 years ago sugar was a rare commodity in England and sweets and desserts were reserved for the upper classes. The participants, guided by the food historian Dr Annie Gray and the social historian Emma Dabiri, will be working as servants at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, recreating original recipes from the 1150s through to the 1660s. Their mission is to create an elaborate aristocratic sugar banquet, featuring candied roses (believed to be a cure for gonorrhoea), a sweet candied root, decorated marzipan and a spectacular model banqueting house made entirely from sugar that makes the Bake Off showstopper look like a primary school project. To fill the hour, we also get a potted history of sugar, its impact on our teeth and how it ignited the slave trade. The role-play element can get tiresome; the programme makers are taking the “to entertain” element of Lord Reith’s mission statement too literally. In this instance, the education bit is more than enough to make good television.
Live Uefa Women’s Euro 2017
Channel 4, 7pm
The omnipresent Clare Balding is the capable pair of hands fronting Channel 4’s coverage of the Uefa Women’s Euro 2017. Balding is in Utrecht in the Netherlands, to present coverage of the group D match between England and Scotland. The Lionesses start as favourites after a third-placed finish at the 2015 World Cup in Canada. But the Scots will be fired up against the old enemy at their first major tournament. The former England striker Michael Owen is part of the analysis team, alongside Chelsea’s Eniola Aluko, who missed the cut for Mark Sampson’s squad, and the Scotland player Kim Little, who was ruled out with a knee injury.
The South Bank Show
Sky Arts, 8pm
The Bafta award-winning writer and director Amma Asante was the first recipient of the Times Breakthrough award at the South Bank Show Awards in 2005. Asante’s films include last year’s interracial love story, A United Kingdom, and 2013’s Belle, which combined sumptuous period gloss with a social conscience. Melvyn Bragg joins the former Grange Hill actor at Chiswick House, where Belle was shot, to discuss her career, the key themes of her work and her latest movie, Where Hands Touch, the story of a biracial girl in Nazi Germany. “It explores all facets of who I am and all facets of what I want to say,” she explains.
Joanna Lumley’s India
ITV, 9pm
The Absolutely Fabulous star’s Indian adventure concludes with a spot of tiger watching at the stunning Ranthambore National Park; a visit to the spot where her father proposed to her mother; and a stint working in a call centre in Delhi. She then heads into the mountains for an audience with his holiness, the Dalai Lama. Lumley asks him about the meaning of life, and he obliges with a nice soundbite: “Compassion is much better than anger.” He also seems delighted with the drone she offers as a gift — definitely a spiritual leader for our times.
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Fargo
Channel 4, 10.30pm
During season three of Fargo, an American journalist wrote that he felt that if there was to be a fourth season, the showrunner Noah Hawley should consider a change of location. Take it out of the frozen prairies of Minnesota and relocate it somewhere sunny — Florida, perhaps? Without wishing to overegg the pudding, that is sacrilege. Tonight’s tense, cinematic episode, in which Nikki Swango and her deaf saviour are pursued through a snowy forest by Varga’s henchmen, is a prime example of why the location is everything. Take that away and it just wouldn’t be Fargo any more.
Catch-up TV
The Story of the Sideman
BBC iPlayer, to August 7
Here’s a fresh tale of rock’n’roll: a feature-length film bigging up the backing musicians who share the stage with the world’s superstars. Their talents often exceed the names on the billboard, yet they get none of the fame and adoration. Our guide through a tale of triumph and thwarted ambition is Earl Slick, a guitarist for David Bowie for 40 years. Slick explains how the job of the “sidie” is to fit in with the vision of the boss, but never to cramp their style. “We don’t compete with the lead guy,” he says. “That’s not a sideman, that’s an out-of-work musician.” As with the Oscar-winning 2014 film 20 Feet from Stardom, putting the sidemen centre stage feels like nothing less than they deserve.
James Jackson
Film choice
The Numbers Station (15, 2013)
Movies4Men, 9pm
John Cusack stars as Emerson Kent, an end-of-his-tether CIA operative who, after bungling an assassination job thanks to an attack of conscience, is banished to deepest, darkest Suffolk to guard a top-secret code operator at an American base. Before you can say “isn’t that the Bentwaters Cold War Museum?”, Kent and his glossy-haired charge (played by Malin Akerman, familiar to Billions fans as Lara Axelrod) are on the run from a team of curiously well-drilled hitmen. Intrigue abounds, between the bullets, and the claustrophobic setting works nicely. Not a classic, but a strong British cast — Liam Cunningham, Finbar Lynch, Lucy Griffiths, Bryan Dick — adds to the value. (89min)
Chris Bennion
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The Sweeney (15, 2012)
Film4, 10.45pm
In the role of DI Jack Regan, Ray Winstone has a face like a clenched fist and blood pressure so high it threatens to blow the top of his head off. Winstone’s entertainingly belligerent turn is the powerhouse of the director Nick Love’s bruising film version of the Seventies ITV series. Love has updated the setting — in the original series, the coppers of the Flying Squad used to operate out of an ashtray with a couple of desks in it; now they get a high-tech glass edifice full of computer gadgetry. Yet the ad hoc approach to law enforcement is untouched; the Sweeney go in guns blazing. They will punch through a wall with their bare fists to throttle a bit of justice into some nasty little toerag. I am not exaggerating — this actually happens. (112min)
Wendy Ide
A Separation (PG, 2011)
Film4, 1am
This outstanding Iranian film represents the most elegant piece of cinematic sleight of hand in a long time. Empathetically, compassionately and intelligently, the film explores a moral conundrum involving a divorcing couple and the woman they hired to care for the husband’s elderly father. The setting is contemporary Iran, and while the legal system explored during the film is completely alien, the underlying themes are universal. The writer and director Asghar Farhadi’s plotting is deft; he keeps his cards hidden, revealing them sparingly to puncture the audiences assumptions of culpability and guilt, time and again. The film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film but, unusually for a picture not in English, it also earned a nomination for Best Screenplay. (123min)
WI
Radio choice, by Catherine Nixey
The Weekend Documentary: The Museum of Lost Objects — India and Pakistan
World Service, 9.06am
“When I was told we were going to Pakistan, I first wondered where that was . . .” The numbers involved in the partition of India make the scale of the upheaval almost unthinkable; in what was, in historical terms, a blink of an eye, hundreds of thousands of people were killed and millions were displaced. In this programme the journalist Kanishk Tharoor makes it thinkable through excellent interviews and single objects. He speaks to an elderly man who remembers, as a small boy, being displaced to this place that he had never heard of. Even now, in the trembling voice of the old man, you can hear the uncertainty of the boy. “My reaction to all this was bewilderment,” he says. “Where is Karachi? What is Karachi?” The programme also tells the story of the 6,000-year-old necklace of Mohenjo Daro. It was broken into two pieces to satisfy both countries.
The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
Radio 4, 2.15pm
There are some voices that are so lovely that it doesn’t matter much what they read; you’d listen anyway. John Hurt had one of them. Janice Acquah, who reads the part of Mma Ramotswe in this adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s stories, has another. These are stories whose point is less what happens than the way in which it happens. Or rather doesn’t. Today’s episode features a dog that is run over and a Canadian woman who must face the truth about her past. And plenty of drinking of red bush tea.