Viewing guide, by Gabriel Tate
Fargo
Channel 4, 10.30pm
A patchier proposition than the first two seasons, Noah Hawley’s third intelligent, ambitious and brilliantly imagined riff on the Coen brothers’ original comes to a predictably tricksy, gloomy and difficult climax. Even in its longueurs, it was sustained by the quality of the performances (Carrie Coon’s initially eager, eventually resigned cop, David Thewlis’s monstrous villain with his graveyard of teeth, Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s avenging angel), and the same goes for the finale, as Gloria (Coon) teams up with the IRS, and Nikki (Winstead) brings Mr Wrench (Russell Harvard, plucked somewhat gratuitously from series one) to the party, all aiming to bring down VM Varga (Thewlis). Poor Emmit (Ewan McGregor, probably better as the twin brother Ray) remains the terminal patsy, while the plot gears turn round him. The payoff won’t satisfy everyone by a long chalk, but it’s undeniably of a piece with the series as a whole, and its unarguably contemporary musings on good versus evil, order versus chaos, and reality versus artifice. The concluding showdown all but references “alternative facts”, although Hawley is far too smart to make that explicit. All told, it has been a cerebral if occasionally chilly treat, just as clever and witty as its predecessors, but lacking the warmth. Hawley has done remarkable work on this franchise, and the series has justified itself purely in having established its creator at the heart of television’s golden age — but that’s probably enough Fargo now, ooh-kay?
The Sweet Makers: A Victorian Treat
BBC Two, 8pm
Our four time-travelling confectioners reach the 20th century as the entertaining and instructive mash-up of Victorian Farm and The Great British Bake Off continues. It was an era when cheap sugar meant that sweets — including the much-coveted chocolate — were available to all social classes for the first time, and many familiar modern brands were born. Paul A Young, Cynthia Stroud, Diana Short and Andy Baxendale try their hands at making boiled sweets, fruit pastilles and giant Easter eggs, while the experts dispense cautionary tales of toxic food colourants and the intriguing role of Quakers in the industry.
The South Bank Show: Sally Wainwright
Sky Arts, 8pm
Happy Valley has elevated Sally Wainwright to the pantheon of great British screenwriters, but she has been quietly producing superb television drama for some years, starting in 2000 with At Home with the Braithwaites, then the underrated Jane Hall a few years later. Melvyn Bragg talks to her about her life and career, from her early days as a playwright to her recent, splendid Brontës drama To Walk Invisible, and finds her on typically expansive and enjoyably outspoken form.
Hyper Evolution: Rise of the Robots
BBC Four, 9pm
Television’s fascination with artificial intelligence continues unabated. While Westworld and Humans have explored it with considerable class and ample dramatic licence, Hyper Evolution finds the scientists Dr Ben Garrod and Professor Danielle George examining the realities, such as they are. During their investigations, they encounter Kirobo, a machine designed to be a companion on the International Space Station (shades of HAL-9000 there) and iCub, a robot forming its own understanding of and perspective on the world. Fascinating stuff, and more than a little worrying.
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Long Lost Family
ITV, 9pm
Nicky Campbell and Davina McCall take on two more heart-wrenching tales of family estrangement caused by miserable luck and circumstance. First up is a dedicated foster parent who fathered a son before meeting his wife, yet couldn’t marry the mother because he was in the process of getting divorced — he hopes to locate his son. Second, a deaf woman goes in search of her mother, who gave her up for adoption under pressure from the nuns at the Catholic home where she was born. Long Lost Family remains a minor miracle of sensitive and empathic programme-making.
Catch-up TV, by Chris Bennion
Imagine: Chris Ofili — The Caged Bird’s Song
BBC iPlayer, to August 14
The Manchester artist — now a resident of Trinidad — is the subject of Alan Yentob’s excellent documentary. The Caged Bird’s Song is hanging in the National Gallery in London. It is a tapestry, 3m high and 7m wide, commissioned by the Clothworkers’ Company, designed by Chris Ofili and created, over three years, by a team of master weavers in Edinburgh. The work is inspired by the tropical sights and sounds of Trinidad, as well as classical influences and, believe it or not, the Italian footballer Mario Balotelli. For Ofili it is about “liberation and constraint . . . is the sweeter song the song of the free bird or the song of the caged bird?”
Film choice
Man Up (15, 2015)
BBC Two, 9pm
Man Up stars Simon Pegg and the American actress Lake Bell, who steals the show with her rubbery, expressive face, penchant for self-humiliation and believable English accent. Bell plays Nancy, a 34-year-old singleton who is coming home, miserable, from someone else’s dire engagement party when someone gives her a self-help book on a train. Because of a mix-up, Nancy ends up standing under the clock at Waterloo station with the book, a signal for someone else’s blind date. With a what-the-hell glance, she goes off with a recently divorced stranger, Jack (Pegg). A dozen tequila shots later, the deception goes belly up in a bowling alley as old school friend Sean (an oleaginous Rory Kinnear) reappears. After a slow start, the comedy and chemistry perk up. (88min) Kate Muir
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Cross of Iron (15, 1977)
Talking Pictures, midnight
Orson Welles believed that Cross of Iron was the best war film since All Quiet on the Western Front, and few can match it for highlighting not just the madness of war, but the sheer bonkers brutality of it. That Sam Peckinpah did this from the Nazi Germany point of view only serves to underline his point about the lot of the ordinary man in wartime. James Coburn stars as Sergeant Steiner, a world and war-weary commander who swears his allegiance to his men, rather than Hitler. Maximilian Schell is the aristocratic Prussian officer, Captain Stransky, a cowardly snob who covets Steiner’s Iron Cross and believes zealously in the Third Reich. Peckinpah’s action sequences are long and unremitting, but effective. (133min) Chris Bennion
Arbitrage (15, 2012)
Channel 4, 1.30am
Hedge-fund manager Robert Miller (a well-cast Richard Gere) is immaculate, the kind of expensively groomed silver fox to whom stains just don’t stick. With the entitlement that comes with a vast personal fortune, Miller assumes that he can bend the rules, professionally and in his personal life. Arbitrage is the minutely observed and impressively acted account of what happens when one unexpected and catastrophic accident leaves Miller exposed, threatening to topple the card house of lies that he has built. The superior cast (Susan Sarandon, Tim Roth and Brit Marling) gives the film weight. (107min) Wendy Ide
Radio choice, by Joe Clay
From Shame to Pride
Radio 4, 9am
Anne Lister is a gay icon nonpareil, one of the most forward-thinking characters in history. A 19th-century Yorkshirewoman and landowner, Lister defied the mores of her time by being openly, passionately gay and writing a racy four-million-word diary (adapted into a BBC drama in 2010 starring Maxine Peake). She even openly rebelled against convention by initiating a form of marriage ceremony to her beloved. Lister is one of the heroes of this new two-part series, presented by the crime writer Val McDermid, herself in a long-term lesbian partnership, that explores the history of same-sex love. This first part charts the lives of homosexuals from the Renaissance to the Victorian age. The historians Matt Cook, Rictor Norton and Rebecca Jennings add colour, including a description of the “molly-houses” of 18th-century London, where men met to enjoy same-sex company, dancing and drinking in relative safety.
Live BBC Proms 2017
Radio 3, 7.30pm
The celebrations of John Adams’s 70th birthday continue with a concert featuring the Philharmonia Orchestra performing Naive and Sentimental Music, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, to whom Adams dedicated the beautiful and bracing orchestral work. Also featuring in Prom No 24 is Stravinsky’s Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch, a colourful recomposition of Bach’s variations on the Lutheran hymn. And the rising French mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa is the soloist in Ravel’s heady song cycle Shéhérazade, “an exotic musical fantasy of distant lands and forbidden love”.