TV & Radio Friday October 14

Alan Partridge, a-ha!, on The Jonathan Ross Show, and The Inbetweeners bring back the horror of high school, only funnier.

TV

The Inbetweeners

Human 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 Jonathan Ross Show (TV1, 8.30pm). A short run for Jonathan Ross; the show comes to an end tonight with guests Gary Barlow and Tulisa Constostavlos (The X Factor judges); Ewan McGregor; Alan Partridge, who is promoting his autobiography I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan; and Cee Lo Green. McGregor, believe it or not, jumps over Partridge, Barlow and Constostavlos on a motorbike.

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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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (TV2, 7.30pm). TV2 seems to be playing the entire Harry Potter series on random select but not one every week. Grabbed out of the bag this week is the third instalment, considered one of the best. The eponymous prisoner is Sirius Black, played with ghoulish gusto by Gary Oldman. (2004) 7 – Diana Balham

Alien Resurrection (Four, 8.30pm). Like an alien Jurassic Park, Ripley is cloned and brought back for the fourth and final time. The director is The City of Children’s Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who went on to make the absurdly sweet Amélie – go figure); the writer is one of the masters of the geek universe, Joss Whedon, although he later said the movie was “executed in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable”. He was perhaps being a bit harsh. As far as sequels go, it really doesn’t suck. Ripley is now an alien-human hybrid, which makes her motives unclear, and there’s plenty of action and dark humour, plus the occasional Whedon gem (“They’ll breed, you’ll die”) for the geek lexicon. (1997) 8

Salt (Sky Movies, Sky 020, 8.30pm). Philip Noyce takes a role originally intended for Tom Cruise and gives it to a girl – results are … basically the same. Angelina Jolie is the Energizer Bunny who can never slow down because she’s on the run from her own people. When a Russian defector announces that CIA agent Evelyn Salt is a Russian sleeper spy, off she goes on an increasingly more ridiculous stuntfest but, says Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, at least Noyce doesn’t waste anyone’s time. A slick Friday night in. (2010) 6

Match Point (Movies Greats, Sky 022, 8.30pm). Woody Allen’s fable about the part that luck plays in destiny was loved by the Americans (“The film-maker’s best in quite a long time,” said Variety), and loathed by the British (“As flat-footed a movie as Allen has ever made,” said the Telegraph). The problem seems to lie in Allen’s depiction of the British class system, of which he apparently has only a visitor’s knowledge. But then, the film is a fable, influenced by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, about a talentless young man (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who marries into an upper-class family, and then has an affair with an equally talentless actor (Scarlett Johansson) that could wreck his lifestyle. With that many bee-stung lips on screen, you’d think there’d be some sizzle, but Rhys Meyers and Johansson are curiously cold, which is probably how Match Point will leave you. (2005) 6

When We Were Kings (Maori, 9.30pm). Leon Gast’s magnificent documentary about the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle that’s as much about politics, race relations and marketing as it is about boxing. There’s the fledgling wide-boy promoter Don King, who talked Zaire’s President, Mobutu Sese Seko, into allowing the fight to take place in his country; an international consortium of companies that financed the $5 million winner’s purse; and BB King, James Brown and Bill Withers, who played at the three-day music festival before the event. And right at the centre, there’s world heavyweight champion George Foreman and former champion and underdog Muhammad Ali, seven years his senior at 32. Charisma went a long way with Ali but hitting Foreman hard was what was needed on the night. “We’re gonna get it awn because we don’t get alawng,” he drawled in the run-up to the fight. Norman Mailer, George Plimpton and Hunter S Thompson were all part of the press corps, but Thompson was a no-show. While the fight was on, he was floating in his hotel pool nursing a bottle. Knockout. (1996) 8 – Diana Balham

RADIO

Music Alive (Radio New Zealand Concert, 8.00pm). In the third Brahmissimo! concert in the series, New Zealand pianist Michael Houstoun plays Brahms’ Symphony No 3 in F and his Piano Concerto No 1 in D Minor. (The final concert plays next week.)

Classic Concert (Radio New Zealand National, 11.06pm). This new series presents concerts by big names in contemporary music. First up it’s Paul McCartney – Good Evening New York City, in which Macca plays songs from his Beatles and Wings days and from solo projects.