TV1 finds something good for Sunday Theatre, and Shark Week begins on Discovery, ow.
TV
Shark Week
Raising Hope (TV3, 7.00pm). They have good guests on Hope: tonight, it’s Mary Lynn Rajskub, last seen as the verging-on-autistic Chloe in 24, but in real life a terrific comedian. In typically warped Hope style, she plays a reverse-gender polygamist, a woman with four husbands, including Jimmy’s cousin Mike. In other guest-star news, Megan Mullally, last seen in Will & Grace, appears on Parks and Recreation (Four, Monday, 9.00pm) as boss Ron Swanson’s ex-wife. In real life, Mullally and Nick Offerman (who plays Ron) really are married.
Nature’s Miracle Babies (TV1, 7.30pm). Current affairs series Sunday takes a Christmas break, and is replaced with … cute animal babies. Aw. These babies are more special than most, because they could be the key to saving endangered species. British zoologist Martin Hughes-Games travels the world looking at what is being done for rare species such as the giant panda, pied tamarin, Asian rhino, barbary lion and aye-aye lemur.
Summer of the Shark (Discovery, Sky 070, 7.30pm). It’s that special time of the year again, just before summer, when Discovery channel likes to scare us with Shark Week, and there are some doozies. It begins with Summer of the Shark, a special about the sudden rise in shark attacks in 2008-09 that closed beaches across Australia. There’s Rogue Sharks (Discovery, Sky 070, Monday, 7.30pm), which asks if some sharks have developed a taste for human flesh. Let’s hope the answer is “no”. And there is Killer Sharks: The Attacks of Black December (Discovery, Sky 070, Wednesday, 7.30pm), about the infamous attacks near Durban, South Africa, in 1957-58 that left five people dead.
Five Daughters (TV1, 8.30pm). The way TV1 has been mucking around with its prestige Sunday Theatre timeslot this year, it’s difficult to tell when something of quality actually turns up. But at last they’ve rummaged around in the back of the cupboard and found Five Daughters, a dramatisation of the 2006 murders of five young women in Ipswich. The three-part programme was universally lauded in the UK, where it was nominated for three Baftas, and won a Royal Television Society award. Sarah Lancashire, who plays the mother of one of the murdered women, gives “the performance of her career”, said Guardian critic Vicky Frost. The Telegraph was similarly effusive about Jaime Winstone and Aisling Loftus, who play victims Anneli Alderton and Gemma Adams with “disconcerting radiance and intelligence”, it said. The key is the focus on the five women rather than, as is usual in crime dramas, to turn the killer into an evil genius who is taunting police with diabolical, elaborate plans. In reality, the murderer was a 48-year-old forklift driver, who was convicted in 2008. Writer Stephen Butchard discovered that the families were very unhappy about the media’s portrayal of the murdered women, who were all working as streetwalkers to fund their drug habits. The discovery of their bodies over a period of two weeks in wooded areas around Ipswich sparked the biggest manhunt in the UK since the Yorkshire Ripper in the 1970s. But their continued portrayal as prostitutes was demeaning. “They were quite distressed that these people that they knew and loved had ended up with the label,” Butchard told the BBC. “I was interested in who they were, and what led them to being where they were,” he says. “Just because they were sex workers on the street it didn’t mean that they were monsters or had crossed some line.”
FILM
aimRenderAd(300, 250, '300X250','ContentRect','/POS=POS2'); if(!$.browser.msie){ ContentRect_frame = $("#ContentRect")[0]; ContentRect_frame.src = ContentRect_frame.src; }Four Holidays (TV2, 8.30pm). A Christmas comedy about the joy of hating your family. The very tall Vince Vaughn and the very short Reese Witherspoon might be able to see eye to eye as loving couple Brad and Kate, but nobody else does. Despite having four Oscar winners playing the various divorced parents (Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight and Mary Steenburgen), this is a mean, measly and distinctly unfestive offering. (2008) 5 – Diana Balham
Little Miss Sunshine (TV3, 8.30pm). A terrifically charming satire of aspirational American culture. The Hoovers are, basically, a family of losers: dad Greg Kinnear has devised a Tony Robbins-esque motivational programme; stepson Paul Dano reads Nietzsche and has vowed not to speak until he is accepted into the Air Force; uncle Steve Carell is a suicidal Proust scholar; and Alan Arkin has been kicked out of his old folks’ home for snorting heroin. Mum Toni Collette has the unenviable job of keeping them all together, a task that only gets worse when they set off on a road trip to take daughter Abigail Breslin – an unusual kid to say the least – to a beauty pageant in California. Dreams may be realised, but not in the way you would expect. (2006) 9
Beverly Hills Ninja (Four, 8.30pm). So, which fits into this plush suburb of LA best – a cop, a ninja or a chihuahua? The late Chris Farley milks every possible fat, not-fitting-in joke as a white guy brought up by Japanese warriors after he fell off a cruise ship as a child. Pretty stupid fun, but he won’t be making any more. (1997) 4 – Diana Balham
Man on the Moon (Maori, 8.30pm). The great Milos Forman (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest) tackled the great – or certainly weird – comedic talents of Andy Kaufman in this biopic starring Jim Carrey. Unless you’re familiar with Kaufman’s eccentricities, it’s hard to know where he ends and Carrey begins, and it would have been a different film again if Edward Norton, John Cusack, Kevin Spacey or Hank Azaria, all of whom auditioned, had won the part. (1999) 7 – Diana Balham
Macbeth (Stratos & Sky 089, 8.30pm). It’s unfortunate the publicity shot for Orson Welles’s Macbeth is so unintentionally comical. With his pointy-eared crown, hairy cloak held in place with a chain, and mopey expression, he looks like a bad dog that’s been sent to its kennel. And this is a very odd film. Welles was shackled to Republic Pictures with a minuscule budget and timeframe. Using the sets from B-grade westerns, he produced a moody, surrealistic version of Shakespeare’s classic, complete with thick Scottish accents, which the studio and preview audiences hated. He was forced to cut 20 minutes from the film and redub with “normal” voices, but the thing still bombed. Realising he was meant for Europe, where they liked his Macbeth, Welles spent the next decade there. Although not on a par with Citizen Kane or Othello, this is an important part of the Orson Welles story. With Jeanette Nolan (in her first screen role), Dan O’Herlihy, Roddy McDowall, and Welles’s daughter Christopher (yes, really) as one of Macduff’s murdered children. (1948) 7 – Diana Balham
RADIO
Spectrum (Radio New Zealand National, 12.15pm). David Steemson sits down for a bit of afternoon tea with Irishwoman Meg Daly, who would like you to know there’s more to Celtic cuisine than haggis, rarebit and Guinness (“there’s a steak in every pint!”). But it was a sad event – the sudden death of Green Party co-leader Rod Donald in 2005 – that prompted her to convert an interest into a business. She now turns out tattie scones, bara brith (Welsh tea bread) and soda bread from her country kitchen, selling her wares at farmers’ markets around the Waikato. And she was a huge hit with the boyos during the Rugby World Cup, when the Welsh team were based in Hamilton. – Diana Balham
Opera on Sunday (Radio New Zealand Concert, 3.00pm). This is one-hit wonder Amilcare Ponchielli’s one hit: his 1876 opera La Gioconda, from whence comes the famous Dance of the Hours. Although the work is about a virtuous young woman whose love for her mother comes before everything, many people will only be able to think of ballet-dancing hippos, ostriches and elephants and sinister alligators – thanks to Disney’s Fantasia movie from 1940. Today’s opera recording, from 2003, stars Violeta Urmana and Plácido Domingo with the Bavarian Radio Chorus, Munich Children’s Chorus and the Munich Radio Orchestra, conducted by Marcello Viotti. – Diana Balham
The Sunday Feature (Radio New Zealand National, 4.07pm). Bet you didn’t know it was the International Year of Chemistry. Now that it’s almost over, the Royal Society of New Zealand presents the three-part series Talking Heads 2011, entitled Inside Out: The Chemistry of Food, Sex and Ageing. Kim Hill talks to experts about life’s little mysteries as they relate to the world of chemistry, recorded in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Today, from Te Papa, Hill meets Canadian author and TV personality Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. – Diana Balham
Blue Smoke: The Birth of New Zealand Pop (Radio New Zealand Concert, 7.00pm). Chris Bourke is back with series three of Blue Smoke: The Birth of New Zealand Pop, an adaptation of his award-winning book. Part one –Combos and Comedians – asks those important questions: when did New Zealand rock’n’roll find its groove? And what did the sophisticated set get up to after hours? If you think the answer to the second question is “there wasn’t one”, you may be pleasantly surprised. – Diana Balham
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