TV & Radio Wednesday December 14

Nancy's out of jail in season 7 of Weeds, and "Spanx" enters the vocabulary thanks to the Cleveland ladies.

TV

Weeds

The History of the World in Two Hours (History, Sky 073, 7.30pm). History for the MTV set – 14 billion years is condensed into 120 minutes using computer-generated imagery to depict everything since the moment God said “Stand back, it’s about to blow.” It takes its cue from the emerging field of “big history“, a field of study that uses a multidisciplinary approach to look at history across long time frames.

Hot in Cleveland (TV2, 8.00pm). The ladies of Cleveland bring the word “Spanx” into our vocabulary in an episode called Sisterhood of the Travelling Spanx. A pair of the body-shaping underwear (also mentioned by Jane Lynch after her Emmy ceremony opening dance number) magically fits all the ladies, and they commence to get into all sorts of trouble – including a catfight between Victoria (Wendie Malick) and Melanie Griffith – playing herself.

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The World’s Tallest Man (TV3, 9.20pm). A doco that follows Sultan Kösen from Turkey to the US, where he hopes to find a cure for his gigantism and meet girls. Kösen is more than 2.4m tall and has a medical condition that causes him to grow. In the US he meets America’s tallest man, former Harlem Globetrotter George Bell.

Weeds (SoHo, Sky 010, 10.00pm). If we’re lucky, this might be one of the shows that will eventually wash up on Prime. It had been there up till now, but SoHo has dibs on the latest season (No 7), which is set three years after Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) turned herself in to the FBI and was sent away. You’ve got to hand it to Weeds for having the most forward momentum of all the edgy half-hour shows; each series has been set somewhere new, and the Botwins are now in New York, where Nancy is in a halfway house. This doesn’t stop her from making wrong choices, of course.

FILM

Johnny English (TV3, 7.30pm). Apparently, the Chinese title of this movie translates into “Mr Bean (or Silly Bean, as he’s called in China) Becomes a Secret Agent”. And that’s the problem: too much Bean and not enough Rowan Atkinson. Although that’s his own Aston Martin he’s driving. Bean, of course, could barely control a Mini. (2003) 5 – Diana Balham

Labyrinth (Movies Greats, Sky 022, 8.30pm). Sure, it’s a cult hit now, but this Jim Henson-directed caper featuring David Bowie as the Goblin King didn’t exactly send movie-goers into raptures in 1986. Python Terry Jones wrote the script, Bowie did the music and George Lucas produced, which makes it worth having a look – and a young Jennifer Connolly, who stars as a babysitter who sends her brother into the Goblin World and has 13 hours to retrieve him from the MC Escher-like Labyrinth. Retro fun. (1986)

Balibo (Rialto, Sky 025, 8.30pm).“Not just a gripping film, but an important one,” said our reviewer David Larsen about Robert Connolly’s dramatisation of the Balibo Five, journalists who went missing in East Timor in 1975. Anthony LaPaglia plays the world-weary journo Roger East, who went to find out what happened to his colleagues. (2009)