thu 28/03/2024

tv

Arena: Jonathan Miller, BBC Two

ASH Smyth

A director who is “passionate about biology”; a humorist who “hardly ever mocks”; an artist who speaks fluently about the origin of species; a non-musician who has directed some of the best-received opera productions of the modern era; a doctor with his own profile on IMDB. In short, a man who puts the “poly” into “polymath” – and like as not does it in Greek. Don’t you just hate Jonathan Miller?

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Dexter, Series 6, FX

Emma Dibdin

Now on its third showrunner and entering its sixth season, it’s perhaps not a surprise that this once pitch-black drama, centring on a disturbed forensic analyst who moonlights as a vigilante serial killer, has lost its edge. The latest episode begins on a promisingly perilous note as Dexter (Michael C Hall) staggers through an abandoned lot having been stabbed, but there’s a characteristically punch-pulling reveal in the offing.

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Mad Men, Series 5, Sky Atlantic

Emma Dibdin

The most shocking moment in this feature-length episode of Mad Men – for which the phrase “long-awaited” seems an understatement after a 17-month hiatus – is a quiet one. It’s not a moment on the level of a man getting his foot severed by a lawnmower, or Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) out-of-nowhere proposal to doe-eyed secretary Megan (Jessica Paré) in last season’s finale.

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Hit the Road Jack, Channel 4

Veronica Lee

It can't be often that producers are faced with the agreeable problem of trying to shoehorn in several talents when devising a debut solo vehicle for a stand-up making the transition to television entertainer, but Hit the Road Jack's makers had that challenge with Jack Whitehall. Can he do jokes, spoof sketches and documentary-style pieces, followed by a bit of Candid Camera-like comedy, then chat-show banter with a celebrity guest?

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One Night, BBC One

Fiona Sturges

“Everything’s so bloody uphill, isn’t it?” whined kitchen salesman Ted (Douglas Hodge) upon realising that he’d left the charcoal for the evening's barbeque at the supermarket. But the charcoal wasn’t really the problem. There was the girl from the estate over the road - “all big earrings and attitude” - dropping litter outside his house and then shouting abuse when he suggested she pick it up.

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Titanic, ITV1

Adam Sweeting

Imagine my surprise when we weren't much more than halfway through this first episode, and the flipping thing hit the iceberg. But of course writer Julian Fellowes was way ahead of me, and his four-part series about RMS Unsinkable is evidently going to circle around the vessel's fate from various viewpoints in assorted time frames.

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Classic Albums: Peter Gabriel - So, BBC Four

graeme Thomson

In the early Eighties Peter Gabriel was the ne plus ultra of arty, experimental margin-hangers, breaking cover occasionally with an improbable hit single before “retreating back into the bushes with my normal crowd”. His fifth studio album, So, changed all that. Its lead single “Sledgehammer” strutted over the dividing line between cult kudos and mass-market kerching, leading Gabriel and the rest of this darkly soulful album straight into the arms of the mainstream.

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Death Row, Channel 4

Kieron Tyler

“A place of human bondage, a place of human suffering,” was how Hank Skinner described the Texas prison where he’s spent the 17 years. On death row, he's convicted of triple murder. The subject of the disquieting first entry in Werner Herzog’s series on condemned prisoners, Skinner was sanguine in the face of death but pursuing every means to prolong its arrival.

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The Apprentice, Series 8, BBC One/ You're Fired!, BBC Two

Veronica Lee

You may think that, eight series in, applicants for The Apprentice would rein it in a bit. Overblown egos, fantastical verbal imagery to describe their always unique talents, hyperbolic self-assessment - we had all of those, and so much more, in last night's hugely enjoyable series opener. Welcome to another bunch of hopelessly, and hilariously, deluded men and women in search of Lord Sugar's £250,000 investment.

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WikiLeaks: The Secret Life of a Superpower, BBC Two

Fiona Sturges

If you’ve ever had that cold, clammy feeling following the realisation that an email, in which you have been less than flattering about a colleague, has accidentally landed in said colleague’s inbox, then you will have experienced roughly a millionth of the pain felt by assorted US government officials in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal.

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