TV & Radio Sunday October 30

Stephen Hawking puts to bed that whole God thing, and a dramatisation of the Live Aid thing.

TV

When Harvey Met Bob

Sunday (TV1, 7.30pm). Tonight: an ABC story about the two Mormons who are having a tilt at the White House: Mitt Romney and John Huntsman; and a Channel 7 story about Kiwi mountain climber Annie Doyle.

60 Minutes (TV3, 7.30pm). Tonight: a story about Saad Mohseni, an Australian who has set up a television network in Afghanistan. Everyone seems to love it except those ultimate killjoys, the Taliban. Also, a report about Steve Jobs, including some of the 40 interviews he gave to his biographer Walter Isaacson; and a Tauranga woman who is trying to stop people in the Philippines from eating dog meat, a practice that has been banned, but which continues illicitly.

Rick Stein’s Spain (Prime, 7.30pm). Apparently, chefs no longer just travel to interesting locations to sample the food, they have to be seen to travel to distant destinations – Al Brown has a pick-up truck, Michael Van de Elzen had a whole truck, and Rick Stein has an old campervan in which he is searching out the soul, or alma, of Spanish cooking. It’ll be paella on wheels.

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Curiosity: Did God Create the Universe? (Discovery, Sky 070, 7.30pm). Television just can’t help itself: it wants everything to be sexy. Even science. Especially science, because that is the only way that we’re going to learn anything, right? Discovery Channel’s new Curiosity series considerably sexes things up with actors, film-makers and television personalities, who explore concepts such as “why sex is fun”, “surviving an alien attack”, and “the nature of evil”. The presenters include actors Morgan Freeman, Michelle Rodriguez, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and film-makers Eli Roth and Morgan Spurlock. Slightly bucking the trend (although he is still a superstar) is physicist Stephen Hawking, who presents the first episode Curiosity: Did God Create the Universe?, based on his most recent book, The Grand Design. It’s a rhetorical question – Hawking has already said God didn’t do any such thing. The trouble is, you may have to have degrees in astrophysics and maths to understand why not. Even Hawking concedes at one point, “If you are not a math head, this may be hard to understand.” However, he explains (with some narration from British actor Benedict Cumberbatch), using as many metaphors as possible, how the Big Bang came from nothing and Discovery supplies as many visual aids as possible (from Vikings to tennis matches) and perhaps a little of all that amazing knowledge will rub off on us.

Sunday Theatre: Live Aid – When Harvey Met Bob (TV1, 8.30pm). A dramatisation that was screened last year in the UK to mark the 25th anniversary of Live Aid – remember that? It’s supposed to be the story of how Bob Geldof got together with concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith to do something for the starving Ethiopians, although the Guardian’s Andrew Anthony wasn’t so convinced: the story “would have made a fascinating documentary” and the role of Goldsmith (played by Ian Hart) was shrunk “to little more than a line-feeder to the greater cause of Geldof’s righteously surly ego”. Everyone seems to agree Hart and Domhnall Gleeson as Geldolf are fantastic, except Peaches Geldolf – someone who should know – who tweeted: “The guy acting as my dad is beyond terrible … What is that accent?! He’s not a leprechaun!”

Style Pasifika (TV1, 10.25pm). Style Pasifika just gets bigger and bigger and better and better and this year was staged as part of the REAL NZ Festival, which has been running during the Rugby World Cup. This fabulous show is now in its 17th year and was staged at Auckland’s Vector Arena.

FILM

The Invention of Lying (TV3, 8.30pm). The best comedy ever. Ricky Gervais is funnier than he was in The Office. It’s hilarious all the way through. He’s great at directing himself. No, hang on. Unlike the characters in this movie, we don’t live in a world where nobody lies. Truth is, the funny set-up wanes quickly, like being allowed to eat only chocolate chip biscuits. Gervais’s clout across the Atlantic meant he could attract a sterling cast, though: it’s got Rob Lowe, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tina Fey, Jason Bateman, Christopher Guest, Edward Norton, Jennifer Garner and his old pal, dopey Stephen Merchant from Extras. (2009) 6

The Truth (Rialto, Sky 025, 8.30pm). Rialto has been having a season of French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, the French director who gave Hitchcock a run for his money with Les Diaboliques, The Wages of Fear and The Inferno in the 1960s. This 1960 movie features sex bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigette_Bardot Brigette Bardot, who is a “seductress” charged with her lover’s murder. Perhaps mirroring French reaction to Bardot’s overt sexuality, her character’s loose (gasp!) lifestyle is put on trial when she is put on the stand. (1960)

RADIO

The Slightly Correct Political Show (podcast at facebook.com/SlightlyCorrect Sunday evenings). Comedian Jeremy Elwood and broadcaster Pat Brittenden claim to have come up with the first independent political podcast with their new show, playing in the run-up (now a gallop?) to the general election in November. The Slightly Correct Political Show has been, in their words, “asking questions you don’t hear in other interviews, and getting answers never heard before”, for a few weeks now, with the podcast as its primary outlet, but rebroadcast on Brittenden’s Newstalk ZB show in the early hours of Saturday morning and also available on Twitter (twitter.com/SlightlyCorrect). Each week, they grill a politician, a pundit and a performer. Guests have included Metiria Turei, who explained the “f— you” dance; Ewen Gilmour, who announced which celebrity he wanted to urinate on as a part of a pilot for a new show; Peter Dunne, who revealed that after jumping in and out of bed with so many parties he did indeed catch a disease; and Don Brash, who declared the public can trust him even if his ex-wives couldn’t. This week expect extraordinary utterings from Hone Harawira, Brian Edwards and Rhys Darby.