TV & Radio Tuesday December 6

Time for Downton Abbey to kill off someone with the Spanish flu - but who? Plus, a two-hour tribute to Peter Blake.

TV

Blakey

Blakey (TV1, 8.30pm). A two-hour tribute to Sir Peter Blake, who was killed 10 years ago today while sailing on the Amazon River in Brazil. It’s made by Mark Albiston, who was co-director of the acclaimed short film The Six Dollar Fifty Man. He has pulled together historical footage of Blake as well as interviews with family, friends and colleagues.

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Downton Abbey (Prime, 8.30pm). What eventful lives the Edwardians led, to be sure. The Downton Abbey metronome seems to sway back and forth from bedroom farce to melodrama, from carting a dead Turk back to his room to the deathbed marriage of William and Daisy (and not a dry eye in the house). The deathbed scene seems to be a favourite of writer-creator Julian Fellowes, and there is one tonight as the Spanish influenza sweeps through the land and Lady Grantham, Carson, Mosley and Lavinia all fall ill. Never mind, there’s also a wedding!

The Kennedys (Prime, 10.00pm). THE episode. The one that recreates the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in 1963. It’s not a straight chronology, however; the episode contains a number of flashbacks to events leading up to the Kennedys’ visit (Jack was there to mend fences between the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party). There’s the death of Jack and Jackie’s newborn; the affair with Marilyn Monroe (Charlotte Sullivan) that Jack ends by having his brother Bobby (Barry Pepper, who won an Emmy in September) warn Marilyn off, and her subsequent death; there’s the disagreements between Bobby and Vice President Lyndon Johnson (Don Allison). And there’s Lee Harvey Oswald (Ryan Blakely), carrying a rifle into the Texas School Book Depository in a brown paper bag. However, if you were looking for new fuel for the conspiracy-theory fire, it’s not here: probably wisely, the assassination isn’t fully recreated.

The Time of Your Life (TV1, 11.00pm). If you can skip the implausibility of a woman waking up after 18 years in a coma, removing her own tubes, getting out of bed and walking to the bathroom, then maybe there’s some amusement in what is essentially a murder-mystery with the added frisson of a lost 18 years. The de-comaed woman is Genevieve O’Reilly, who had some sort of accident on her 18th birthday, which also happens to be the night that her friend Brian was killed. It was all a bit much for the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan, however.

FILM

One Fine Day (Four, 8.30pm). Oh, the hilarity of single parenting. George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer look pretty frazzled by the end of this. (1996) 6 – Diana Balham