TV & Radio Tuesday November 28

Nigella is doing ridiculous things in her Christmas kitchen, and Linda Hunt is the best thing about NCIS: Los Angeles.

TV

NCIS: Los Angeles

Nigella’s Christmas Kitchen (Prime, 8.00pm). Has anyone in the history of anything ever cooked a Nigella Lawson recipe? Or do we just like watching her banging about in the kitchen making absurd food such as “puddini” truffles, triple cheese and onion strata, and glazed and toasted vanilla cake brioche? Ridiculous.

Downton Abbey (Prime, 8.30pm). The penultimate episode, which means … lots of setting up for the final. Matthew is still tingling, Mary is still pining, and Lord Grantham has a long-felt want for someone other than his wife. Scandal!

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NCIS: Los Angeles (TV3, 9.25pm). The diminutive Linda Hunt, who won an Oscar in 1982 for The Year of Living Dangerously, is NCIS: Los Angeles’s saving grace, and any episode that sends her out in the field is a notch above the rest. She heads out to visit a former colleague who had been employing a murdered Navy officer; needless to say, the situation gets complicated.

East West 101 (Maori, 9.30pm). A repeat of the Australian SBS series about a Muslim cop (Don Hany from Offspring) fighting crime in Sydney. It’s a multi-award-winner based on the experiences of real detectives in Sydney’s western suburbs, and is perhaps the only Aussie cop show to actually tackle issues of racial and cultural difference.

FILM

Life or Something Like It (Four, 8.30pm). Annoying Lips (Angelina Jolie) versus Annoying Voice (Ed Burns) in a romcom about stopping to smell the roses, which is interesting because this is one aromatically unattractive movie. (2001) 5

The Hedgehog (Rialto, Sky 025, 8.30pm). A not-entirely-successful adaptation of Muriel Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, about a precocious, if morbid, 11-year-old who resolves to kill herself on her 12th birthday. The film shifts focus half-way through to the janitor of the kid’s building, a woman who is keeping her love of Russian literature and Japanese cinema to herself. She is carefully courted by a new Japanese resident, but the film fudges Barbery’s themes of class consciousness and philosophy in real life. (2009)

RADIO

Nine to Noon with Kathryn Ryan (Radio New Zealand National, 9.06am). Today: US correspondent Luiza Savage; feature guest Michael Enright, an expert on competitiveness, regional economic development and international business strategy; Michael Cullen reviews No Higher Honour by Condoleezza Rice; business commentator Rod Oram; Jane Westaway and Harry Ricketts discuss New Zealand literature; and media commentator Gavin Ellis.