The first of the Christmas specials. Oh joy. And Chuck tips its hat to Charlie's Angels.
TV
Chuck
Cricket (Sky Sport 1, Sky 030, 12.30pm). Day one of the test between Australia and the Black Caps. Oh god oh god oh god.
Tabatha’s Salon Takeover (TV3, 9.00pm). They got the title right – it’s not a makeover, it’s a takeover. By Tabatha Coffey, the tough Aussie sheila who’s not afraid to give failing hair salons a poke with her sharp scissors. It’s the third season of the series, and Coffey visits hairdressers in California, Texas and Massachusetts.
Benidorm Christmas Special (TV1, 9.30pm). Oh joy. Christmas is coming and so are the TV specials, which are never really that special, are they? Except maybe Doctor Who. Benidorm is like Are You Being Served? crossed with EastEnders, set on the Costa del Sol: it’s double entendre and broad comedy all the way. “How is it that this stuff is being made, and screened, in 2011?” asked the Guardian, to which we might add: and how is this relevant in any way to us?
aimRenderAd(300, 250, '300X250','ContentRect','/POS=POS2'); if(!$.browser.msie){ ContentRect_frame = $("#ContentRect")[0]; ContentRect_frame.src = ContentRect_frame.src; }Chuck (TV2, 10.30pm). A Charlie’s Angels-style episode in which Sarah reunites with her old spy team – and they’re hot! No, really. The bad guy is played by Lou Diamond Phillips.
Men of a Certain Age (TV2, midnight). Middle-aged men finally get their own sitcom, and TV2 puts it on at midnight. Recording devices at the ready, then, for this Peabody Award-winning series about late-forties disappointments. The idea comes from Ray Romano and Mike Royce, who worked on Everybody Loves Raymond; Romano, Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula play friends whose life trajectories haven’t exactly been stellar. Braugher was Emmy-nominated in 2010 and 2011 for his performance.
FILM
The Dilemma (Sky Movies, Sky 020, 8.30pm). It looks like the sort of comedy that Vince Vaughan, Kevin James and director Ron Howard could make in their sleep, but the movie fluctuates in tone so wildly and the actors, Winona Ryder and Jennifer Connolly among them, are so unsure of their characters that the whole thing is a miserable failure. Avoid like you would a mean drunk at a funeral. (2011)
The Aviator (Movies Greats, Sky 022, 8.30pm). Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Howard Hughes is hardly a Scorsese picture at all; compared to, say, Gangs of New York, it’s restrained, steady, even as it tells a quintessential American story. There are echoes of Citizen Kane in Leonardo DiCaprio’s turn as Hughes, the hugely successful wunderkind who declined into mental illness. Thank goodness for Cate Blanchett, then, who livens up the movie with a fabulous impersonation of Katharine Hepburn. (2004) 8
Bhutto (Rialto, Sky 025, 8.30pm). A documentary about Benazir Bhuto which is also, inevitably, a history lesson about Pakistan. It’s jam-packed, said the SF Chronicle, as it begins with her assassination upon her return to Pakistan in 2007, and then goes back to 1947 and the partition from India. The doco compares the Bhutto family with the Kennedys, says Slant; it “conveys a forceful sense of tectonic social and geopolitical shifts” says the Village Voice. (2010)
RADIO
Music Alive (Radio New Zealand Concert, 8.00pm). The Auckland Phil is conducted by Eckehard Stier in a programme that includes La Création de Monde by Milhaud; Bernstein’s On the Waterfront, Symphonic Suite; Gershwin’s An American in Paris; and Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with pianist Ewa Kupiec as soloist.
The Music Mix (Radio New Zealand National, 11.06pm). An Americana special that includes Chris Isaak, who recorded some of his favourite classic tunes at Sun Studio in Memphis; bluesman Black Joe Lewis; and local country legends Bernie Griffin and the Grifters who play banjo, mandolin, two guitars and a fiddle around a camp fire.
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