THE ART OF FRANCE, BBC4, 9pm
IT’S about time the BBC gave France some attention as the corporation’s various art, food and architecture programmes are so often about Italy. We know that Italy is packed to the rafters with beauty and brilliance but it doesn’t mean other countries shouldn’t get a look-in.
This new three-part series celebrates the art of la belle France and it’s quite heartwarming, as well as educational, given that France has taken a battering recently, making the news for terrorism, the rise of the National Front, strikes, celebrity robberies, presidential sex scandals and riots in les banlieues. There is something soothing in forgetting the current squalor and looking back to the beauty of the past.
Presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon zips through the history of French art, starting in one of the turbulent banlieues, St Denis, to look at its massive Gothic basilica, which shows how France has always been a “mongrel” nation with a million different influences.
CRACKANORY, DAVE, 10pm
OBVIOUSLY based on Jackanory, this is the new series of the storytelling show for adults.
I never watched Jackanory as a child as I assumed anything that wasn’t done as a cartoon would be for adults, and therefore boring. So I had a childhood free of Newsround and Blue Peter and I never got to use “sticky-backed plastic.”
But why should Jackanory have been aimed only at children when everyone loves a good story? I’ll bet there were mums and grandads and stern aunties who were reading the paper or paying the bills but secretly had an ear cocked to the TV.
Now they don’t need to pretend as we have a grown-up version. Tonight, Dara O’Briain who tells a story called A Close Shave, set in ancient Rome. Give yourself up to a good old-fashioned bit of storytelling.
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