New Zealand on a Plate – Off the Beaten Track (TV1, 5.25pm). New Zealanders are obsessed – obsessed! – with food, it seems. Another “culinary journey”, this time shepherded by MasterChef winner Brett McGregor. In the first episode he takes Australian chef Pete Evans to Christchurch, where they meet one of the city’s most famous butchers and then create a lovely lunch with chorizo and salami. The journey also includes a visit to Waipara vineyard, 40km north of Christchurch. But wait, there are more food shows: Donna Hay: Fast, Fresh, Simple (Prime, Tuesday, 7.30pm) features the Australian maven and her vast repertoire of short cuts and tricks; and Peta’s Culinary Adventures in France (Prime, Tuesday, 8.00pm) features Peta Mathias and her students in the South of France as they forage and cook in and around the medieval town of Uzès. That sounds perfectly awful.
The Inbetweeners
Rugby (Maori, 5.00pm and Sky Sport 1, Sky 020, 5.45pm). Some of you may be relieved to know we’re getting close to the pointy end of the Rugby World Cup – certainly, the action is now concentrated in the main centres. The quarter-finals take place in Wellington and Auckland this weekend, beginning with No 1 at the Cake Tin, then No 2 at Eden Park at 8.15pm today. Maori TV screens both games live, TV1 has the second quarter-final live, with highlights of the first game afterwards, and TV3 also screens the second quarter-final live. Tomorrow, rinse and repeat for quarter-finals three and four, except with more excitement – the All Blacks play in No 4 at Eden Park.
Midsomer Murders (Prime, 8.30pm). Lots of secrets among the terribly posh in tonight’s episode, The Creeper, and a rare sighting of Rik Mayall, who you may remember from The Young Ones.
SUNDAY OCTOBER 9V8 Supercars: Bathurst 1000 (TV3, 9.30am). The Rugby World Cup and Bathurst? Hog heaven, for the blokes anyway. Park Dad in front of the telly; he can watch the cars go round and round for seven hours and then catch the All Blacks’ game at Eden Park. What a day.
Our World: Expedition Tiger (TV1, 5.00pm). A BBC series giving us some hope that tigers in the wild might be saved. An expedition led by explorer Steve Backshall travels into remote Bhutan to look for evidence. They use a tracker dog and remote cameras as well as good old-fashioned lying-in-wait to see whether they can see the fearful symmetry burning bright.
Let’s Get Gadgety: 101 Gadgets That Changed the World (History, Sky 073, 7.30pm). A programme presented by (who else?) Richard Dean Anderson, formerly MacGyver, who is the mouthpiece for the editors of Popular Mechanics and a panel of experts. They have decided which gadgets have had the most impact – with a gadget defined as “something you could hold in your hands, mechanical or electronic, and a mass-produced personal item”. We can tell you that No 101 is duct tape, “the ultimate multitool”, used to make repairs in space. Settle in: this is a two-hour special.
MONDAY OCTOBER 10The Indian Doctor (Vibe, Sky 007, 9.30pm). A comedy-drama series that’s a kind of modern Love Thy Neighbour: in 1963, an Indian doctor and his wife are posted to a small Welsh mining village. Hilarity bordering on racism ensues. The doctor and his wife are Sanjeev Bhaskar (The Kumars at No. 42) and Ayesha Dharker (Cutting It).
TUESDAY OCTOBER 11Megafactories (National Geographic, Sky 072, 7.30pm). A doco that follows the three years from conception to launch of the Aston Martin supercar, the One-77. Astonishingly, Aston Martin created this production car at the height of the global economic crisis; presumably the iconic British marque thought there would still be enough millionaires left in the world to buy them. Delivery of the cars began in October 2010, with a limited run of 77 – in May this year, Mainfreight co-founder, New Zealander Neil Graham, bought one for $2.8 million. After it arrived in the country on a Singapore Airlines 747, Graham was reported to be “chuffed”.
aimRenderAd(300, 250, '300X250','ContentRect','/POS=POS2'); if(!$.browser.msie){ ContentRect_frame = $("#ContentRect")[0]; ContentRect_frame.src = ContentRect_frame.src; }Grey’s Anatomy (TV2, 8.35pm). A surprisingly excellent season of Grey’s Anatomy (we’ll just ignore that musical episode), which is pretty good going when a show is seven seasons in. (Yes, there will be an eighth season, and showrunner Shonda Rhimes has confirmed it will continue after that.) Plus, in tonight’s season finale, Rhimes manages to hit the reset button and sends her characters back to the sad places they came from. After all, in this world, too much relationship happiness is a bad thing.
Private Practice (TV2, 9.35pm). Oh no, another season finale – and with Nothing Trivial ending this week, too (see below), what are we going to do for girlie drama now? The fate of the practice is in the balance, apparently, but never mind that – Addison has a new squeeze, and it’s Benjamin Bratt! Bet he wants babies
and everything.
The Truth About Traffic (TVNZ7, Sky 077 and Freeview 7, 10.05pm). A US documentary about the headache traffic has become in the modern world. Science and technology writer Jake Ward explains the complexities of a system with millions of variables, and how the traffic organism is, in fact, completely counter-intuitive. People steer themselves into accidents; we can all move faster by individually driving slower; and humans drive best when rules are taken away.
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 12SPCA Rescue (TV1, 8.00pm). A Christchurch earthquake special that tells the hitherto untold story of a crack SPCA Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) team that assembled after the February 22 earthquake to risk their lives saving trapped animals in the red zone. The programme also follows the work of the Canterbury SPCA, city council animal control officers and other animal welfare workers who helped to find lost and abandoned pets. Most exciting, there is a “dramatic turtle rescue operation” two days after the quake.
Nothing Trivial (TV1, 8.30pm). Aw, goodbye to the gentle drama series that has barely put a foot wrong. Its debut episode had the highest number of viewers of any locally made drama since 2000, so we’re making the safe assumption a second series is going to be made. Great work from all the cast, especially Blair Strang, who has displayed previously unknown subtleties as Brian the plumber. In the finale, Emma has some big news for him, while Mac (Shane Cortese) and Catherine (Tandi Wright) make some decisions about their future.
Harry’s Law (TV1, 9.30pm). The creator of The Practice, Ally McBeal and Boston Legal makes … a legal drama. It could be David E Kelley’s “most egregious show with one of the best actors he’s ever had”, according to Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker, or it might be “attractively amiable”, according to the LA Times. The Harry of the title is the wonderful Kathy Bates, who plays Harriet “Harry” Korn, a bored patent lawyer who is fired from her job and sets up shop in a poor neighbourhood so she can condescend … er, help the less fortunate. Perhaps, as with most of Kelley’s series, it is an acquired taste: after the first season, Bates was nominated for an Emmy
this year, and co-star Paul McCrane won for Outstanding Guest Performance.
Motorway Patrol (TV2, 8.00pm). Oh, Motorway Patrol, of all the observational, cheap-as-chips series, you are our favourite. We laugh, we cry, we are mildly appalled at the speeders, sleepers, overloaders, old dunger cars and inappropriate pedestrians. Our cops are so patient, aren’t they? Or is that just because they’re being filmed? We’ll never know.
Doctor Who (Prime, 8.30pm). Ah! Cybermen!
FRIDAY OCTOBER 14Human Planet (Prime, 7.30pm). This week’s episode is called Life in the Deep Freeze, and looks at how four million people manage to survive in one of the harshest environments on the planet, the Arctic.
The Inbetweeners (UKTV, Sky 006, 8.30pm). If the scars of your normal, average high-school years haven’t quite faded; if the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you happened in the sixth form; or if you still feel a bit annoyed that, once, a bully picked on you, then The Inbetweeners should bring all the horror back. Only funnier. The series captures the excruciating embarrassment, the lame attempts to impress the opposite sex, the “cool” swearing and every humiliation its creators, Damon Beesley and Iain Morris, could mine from their own lives. It’s British comedy gold that makes that other UK teen drama, Skins, with its clued-up, angry, world-weary characters, look wildly overdone. The pathetic protagonists are Will (Simon Bird), a slightly supercilious chap who was busted down from a private school to a comprehensive when his mum and dad divorced; gawky Simon (Joe Thomas); simple-minded Neil (Blake Harrison); and lecherous Jay (James Buckley) – you know, the one in the group who is always talking about sex because he’s never actually done it. At its heart, The Inbetweeners is about male friendship, “the shared language between male friends”, says Beesley. Influences include, not surprisingly, American Pie and Withnail and I, but also Swingers, a movie with its own vocabulary. With typical teenage sarcasm – ie lame – the Inbetweeners have their own language, too, usually involving parts of their own, or girls’, anatomy. In the UK, The Inbetweeners has finished after four seasons – true to its characters, the lads grew up and finished school – but “did it work?” Morris asked in the Guardian. “We’ve been in Malia shooting The Inbetweeners movie, and when I was accosted by a sweaty, drunk 21-year-old who smelled of sick, hugging me because I’d co-written his favourite show, I felt humbled rather than revolted.” That would be a yes, then.
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