THE HANDMAID’S TALE, C4, 9pm
WOMEN aren’t allowed to read in Gilead and so this week, when Offred is again playing Scrabble in the Commander’s study, he offers her a forbidden gift: a women’s magazine he’d saved from the ritual burnings and secreted in his desk.
Such magazines are all about make-up, fashion and perfume ads, and so some might say they’re trivial, but in Offred’s hands the glossy magazine becomes a painful but beautiful reminder of the time before Gilead, when women could spend their own money on whatever they wished.
If you wanted an £80 jar of moisturiser, then just go ahead.
As the Commander is offering flirtation and gifts to Offred, his wife pulls her aside for a frantic, whispered conversation, suggesting how she might help Offred conceive.
There are more flashbacks, showing how Offred met her husband, Luke, in the good old days but, as before, Ofglen absolutely steals the show in a spectacular, heart-stopping scene.
STORYVILLE: RUSSIA’S TOUGHEST PRISON: THE CONDEMNED, BBC4, 10pm
RUSSIA is frightening and fascinating, and there’s a great glut of books and documentaries out just now which ask why that is so.
It’s partly a hangover from the Cold War, when we were taught to fear the menacing, massive Russkies and his nuclear bombs, plus the legend of the Red Army’s sacrifice and fearlessness during the Second World War.Russia is troubling us all over again now, but this time round it has billionaires and the internet. This documentary plays on our old fears of the Russian male as tough and merciless.
It goes inside Penal Colony 56, a terrifying prison in the Ural Mountains which is surrounded by barbed wire and furious dogs.
It contains 260 murderers. In total, they have killed 800 people.
Despite Russian’s infamous secretiveness, they allow cameras inside the prison to conduct frank interviews with the men who are locked in a tiny cell for 23 hours each day. It’s incredible that they don’t all go insane.
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