Sunday
I’m Not In Love: The Story Of 10cc
11.30pm, BBC Four
There’s a big tribute to Bruce Forsyth, The Mighty Atom, on BBC One tonight (Sir Bruce: A Celebration, 9pm), and that’s as it should be. Anybody whose time on TV spanned 1939-2014 has a career worthy of some study, and Tess and Claudia and the great Strictly band and singers are on hand to keep the ball rolling. All the same, from the clips I’ve seen, this show itself (Shirley Bassey, Michael Ball, Alfie Boe) looks pretty horrendous. It’s what Bruce would have wanted. But instead or recommending that, here’s a repeat of a film about 10cc, originally show in 2015 to mark the 40th anniversary of their biggest hit. The band’s members – Kevin Godley, Lol Creme, Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart – reunite to look back and tell the story of how they came together, as well as the tensions that finally resulted in their acrimonious split in 1976. Fans and friends including Stewart Copeland and Graham Nash contribute.
Tuesday
The Ruth Ellis Files: A Very British Crime Story
9pm, BBC Four
True Crime documentaries were once (and will forever remain) a standby of cheap trash TV, but recently there’s been a craze for a classier, more considered approach. The trend was started by 2014’s cult documentary podcast Serial, and this three-part film on the 1955 trial of Ruth Ellis – famously, the last woman hanged in Britain, for the cold-blooded murder of lover, David Blakely – is very much in the Serial mode. Pouring over old files and other archive evidence with the help of ex-police officers and lawyers, presenter Gillian Pachter conducts a measured, forensic re-examination of the case, while exploring wider issues of social justice around it, and the prejudices and assumptions at play in the Britain of the 1950s. As evidence comes to light of omissions, missing witnesses and even a potential accomplice in the killing, it begins to look like the open-and-shut nature of the case back then was due in part to Ellis being judged guilty as “certain type of woman.” Fascinating and sad, it continues tomorrow and Thursday.
Wednesday 14
American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
9pm, BBC Four
With every new episode, this series has only grown more unsettling, while the decision to unravel the story in reverse has become more hauntingly effective. Despite his billing in the title, Gianni Versace is entirely absent from this week’s chapter, save for a virtual appearance as a brand name, when his future killer, Andrew Cunanan, visits an expensive Versace store: a humdrum scene rendered doubly haunting by our knowledge of both what Cunanan has just done, and what he will go on to do. Within the larger story of Cunanan’s killing spree, individual episodes also have their own particular tone, and tonight’s becomes a sad and affecting study of two characters we’re meeting for the first time, Chicago real estate magnate Frank Miglin (Mike Farrell, who some will recall from M*A*S*H) and his wife, Marilyn (Judith Light), a cosmetics entrepreneur and home shopping TV celebrity, who arrives home to discover her husband is missing, then finds life becoming a horror story. Beautiful performances from Farrell and Light.
Thursday
9.30pm, BBC One
Lock your doors, bar your windows and just maybe keep a wee tissue handy as…death comes to Craiglang. Old McLeary, the long-standing local undertaker, has finally gone to meet his maker, and Boabby has been reluctantly persuaded to mark his passing with an honorary lock-in at The Clansman. As the night wears on, Jack and Victor and the other regulars share happy memories of all the people McLeary planted, and then plough on into a game of “Who’s The Most Famous Person You’ve Ever Met” that throws up some surprising names (particularly from Eric). But things take a darker turn when the news begins spreading that there is a new undertaker in town, a certain Iain Duncan Sheathing (a cadaverous Bruce Morton). He's a creepy individual, and macabre rumours swirl around in his wake. Could Isa’s stories be true: that his touch brings death? Could he really be The Grim Reaper? Jack and Victor laugh it all off...until the laughter stops, a new coffin is required, and the fear and panic begins.
Friday
Here Comes The Summer: The Undertones Story
10pm, BBC Four
It’s Friday night, and BBC Four is repeating a documentary about The Undertones. Life can be good. Everyone knows John Peel loved “Teenage Kicks,” but, as perfect as it is, that famous 1978 single can sometimes obscure just how unfailingly great this band was: dig out 1981’s Positive Touch LP (basically, The Undertones’ weird White Album) for evidence. Aside from a Buzzcocks-like ear for great, buzzing pop, the ’Tones stood out amongst the angry punk crowd for writing initially about the trials of adolescent life: hated cousins, mammie’s boys, Subbuteo. But the very fact they hailed from Derry, at the height of the Troubles, gave them a genuinely political dimension many more earnest bands lacked. In this 2012 film, the band, friends, family, fans and contemporaries tell their story, with plenty of archive. It’s part of a night devoted to music from the island of Ireland, bookended by repeats of The Irish Rock Story (9pm), and Van Morrison: Live At Eden (11pm), a recording of The Man’s performance at Cornwall’s Eden Project last summer.
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