Today, July 10

ARTSNIGHT, BBC2, 11pm

JOURNALIST Lynn Barber, known as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street for her mercilessly perceptive celebrity interviews, presents and curates this week’s episode of Artsnight and takes the opportunity to celebrate American pop culture. In an instant, she’s refuting the idea that arts programming must be about elitist pursuits.

She talks to John Waters, a director and comedian who’s known as a “The Pope of Trash”, for his controversial work. His latest show involves pubic lice, the mocking of revered dead poets and the concept of giving a “facelift” to Lassie. Are these things just done to anger and annoy the public, or is there a deeper meaning hiding beneath the controversy?

Barber also meets Doug Aitken, a multimedia artist who’ll be taking over the Barbican this summer with his latest art installation which will be a recreation of a cool 1960s “happening”.

Will this show leave us pining for the good old days when artists worked with paint and canvas, or will it agitate and provoke us? And if it does the latter then does that mean the artwork has been an immediate success?


ROCK ‘N‘ ROLL AMERICA, BBC4, 9pm

THIS programme would be worth watching just for its contributors. Often, these musical nostalgia shows feature various talking heads who’re only vaguely famous and whose connection to the topic is vaguer still. Some celeb might be invited to talk about a pop craze purely because they remember it. Well, we all remember it – that’s the idea of nostalgia. But this programme gets serious about its guests, and features interviews with Tom Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis and Don Everly.

The show looks at the mid-50s, a time when teenagers, a relatively new invention, were going wild for the new rock ‘n’ roll sound, pushing record sales up by 300 per cent. Music was no longer to be listened to as a family, huddled round the radio. Purchasing your records was now an act of rebellion.

We see how TV and cinema soon got in on the act, luring Elvis onto the screen where his televised gyrating scandalised the older, more conservative, generation. Alabama promptly removed all rock ‘n’ roll from its jukeboxes while the mayor of Jersey City banned the music completely.


TRUE STORIES: AMERICA’S SERIAL KILLER, CHANNEL 4, 10pm

AMERICA has produced an alarming amount of prolific killers so I wonder why Channel 4 have chosen this relatively unknown case and awarded it such a dramatic title. What of Ted Bundy and Son of Sam, John Wayne Gacy and the Night Stalker? There are plenty of murderers in the US who could lay claim to the title of “America’s Serial Killer”, but the notorious names I mentioned above are all either in prison or executed. In other words, they can’t harm us any longer, but the killer in this documentary is, alarmingly, still at large.

The programme tells the story of eleven murders, all linked, and thought to be the work of one serial killer. The bodies were found on Long Island between 2010 and 2011, with no culprit ever traced. The victims were all prostitutes who’d advertised their services online through the Craigslist site (a site whose name pops up in numerous violent and deadly cases).

The mothers of the dead women give distressing interviews about what happened to their daughters, and a sister of one victim tells how the killer taunted her via phone calls, saying: “Your sister is dead.”


Tomorrow, July 11

TALKING PICTURES, BBC2, 1.30pm



WITH the death of Christopher Lee last month, the BBC are repeating this look back at his film career.

The programme promises to take us from his roles as Count Dracula to Count Dooku – though I admit I had to google “Count Dooku” to see who on earth he was. Had I missed out on a great episode in cinematic history? What the hell had I overlooked? Then I saw it was just some Star Wars thing, so there was no need to fret. I can’t even name the principal characters of those films – there’s the gold robot, Indiana Jones and some wee bears – so I won’t worry about not knowing a supplementary character.

Lee always said the favourite of his films was The Wicker Man and he discusses this and countless others (plus the ones which included Counts) in this programme. It consists of clips from a series of interviews stretching back over 60 years, plus excerpts from the films themselves. I’d advise shunning the sunny Saturday weather and surrendering to the fiendish lure of the ultimate scary actor, celebrating The Wicker Man, Dracula, Hammer Horror and, yes, Count Dooku.

CORDON, BBC4, 9pm

WITH the end on Monday of Channel 4’s Man Down, I’m on the lookout for a new favourite programme, and I suppose it has to be Cordon. There isn’t anything else on TV just now which is as brave and as bleak. Of course, it’s a foreign import. I can’t imagine British TV producing anything like this just now.

This week, conditions within the cordon deteriorate dramatically with food supplies threatening to run low. The very nature of the closed-off society, and the rationing of food, has meant the powerful are taking over, with the strong and the arrogant setting up a black market. With the control of food, comes control of the hungry population. In this way, you could view Cordon as a microcosm of capitalist society, or maybe I’m reading too much into it? Perhaps we should just enjoy it as a terrifying look at a plague-stricken city.

Naturally, the government fear that news of the chaos and distress within the cordon will leak to the wider population and cause panic so they block the phone signals from the area – leaving everyone within the lines even more isolated.

WALKING THROUGH HISTORY, C4, 7pm

TONY Robinson takes to the moors above Haworth, West Yorkshire, the stunning landscape which inspired the Brontë sisters and, several years later, led to Kate Bush’s first Number 1 single, Wuthering Heights.

This programme is a lovely mingling of literary and natural history, as Robinson sets out on a four-day trek, going from Bradford to Haworth, taking in Thornton where the Brontë children were born. This allows him to stop off for breaks from all that strenuous hiking to visit various experts. We learn what life was like for the Brontës in Haworth and that, with their house looking directly on to a graveyard, they were constantly reminded of death, and life expectancy in the Yorkshire village was terribly low, meaning the graveyard was always being used. Death was everywhere.

Yet the Bronte family, although not rich, were relatively well-off. Things were far worse for those employed in mills and factories and those working the land. Tony Robinson brings forth some terrible tales of how harsh life was in a Victorian village – all far removed from the romantic image of old rural life once you scrutinise it. Yet the same goes for the Bronte novels: they’re often pigeon-holed as romantic. What rubbish! They’re dark, powerful, immense novels with no silly romance in sight.

T IN THE PARK, BBC3, 8pm




STRAIGHT after the chaos of Glastonbury we get the Scottish version: T in the Park. At the time of writing, the weather’s holding out nicely, but that could all change by the weekend, or in the next 10 minutes.

From 8pm till midnight, BBC3 devotes itself to highlights from the festival, kicking off with Jessie J and George Ezra. I’m scrolling through the listings here, trying to be cool in writing these pop star names down, but really I don’t know who I’m dealing with. I’ve heard of Jessie J but The Script and The Vaccines?

No, I’m not cool enough to know these names. My musical tastes belong to a land shrouded in time, eyeshadow and glitter.

Not for me the names of Avicii and The Libertines. Oh wait! I’ve heard of The Libertines! But not the others, so I’ll simply highlight the fact that the T in the Park festival is being filmed for BBC3, and then I’ll retreat back into memories of Morrissey and the Pet Shop Boys.


Sunday



THE OUTCAST, BBC1, 9pm

WHERE would the BBC’s Sunday night drama team be without literature? Its recent costume dramas have all been nicked from novels, with Poldark, followed immediately by Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and now we have another, The Outcast, from the 2008 prize-winning novel by Sadie Jones.

Clearly there’s great appetite for this, but if it’s the re-telling of novels we want then why do so many of us neglect radio? BBC Radio 4 dramatises plenty of literature, both old and new, but I assume its audience is but a tiny sliver of what Sunday night prime-time BBC1 gets.

The Outcast is set in the 1950s, but opens earlier, with a young boy, Lewis Aldridge, desperately awaiting his father’s return from the war. Lewis idolises his father, seeing him as a great hero, and questions him about his experiences even though the father seems rather distant and unimpressed with his son. Lewis is unaware of any coolness on his father’s part and simply enjoys having him home and relishes lazy summer days with his beautiful mother, who cherishes him, even if his father does not. However, a terrible accident occurs which shatters Lewis’s happy childhood and sets his life onto a different, far darker course.

DRAGONS’ DEN, BBC2, 8.15pm

THE new series of Dragons’ Den returns but it’s without big grumpy Bannatyne which is a shame. His amused sneers as a budding entrepreneur sweated and stuttered before him were always worth watching.

This week’s contestants are a largely irritating bunch who seem to belong more to trashy TV talent shows than Dragons’ Den. You might be able to argue that Dragons’ Den is indeed a TV talent show, in that frightened hopefuls go on display in front of a panel of judges, but I would hope the Den is elevated beyond the likes of The X Factor due to the serious money involved. Those singing shows might offer “a million pound contract” but the winner usually vanishes quite soon and the money comes to nothing, whereas there is a real chance of success on Dragons’ Den.

However, the contestants this week bring a whiff of X Factor with them as they each trot out sob stories about their terrible struggles and how they’re doing it all for their children….Oh shut up. If you’re serious about business then you’re doing it for the money. Pull yourself together or get on the X Factor.

JOANNA LUMLEY’S TRANS-SIBERIAN ADVENTURE, STV, 9pm

YOU might dismiss this as just another celebrity travelogue from ITV. We’ve just finished seeing Griff Rhys Jones potter around Africa by train, so now here’s Joanna Lumley pottering around Asia by train. Same format, mode of transport, different celeb. That’s what I thought, initially, and was ready to be quite snooty about this, but I enjoyed the show tremendously.

Her journey on the famous Trans-Siberian railway starts in Hong Kong and will take her across China, Mongolia and Russia. The pleasure in having Lumley front the programme is that she’s not just a bland, dizzy celebrity, but is actually widely-travelled and knowledgeable about these places, so is able to offer little anecdotes not just history and facts. She has a connection to Mongolia through the Ghurkas, she visited Moscow in the 1960s to model when the Cold War was at its peak, and she lived in Hong Kong as a child and can remember sitting on the balcony of their flat as her mother taught their guinea pigs to whistle. Her old flat has vanished now as Hong Kong has marched into modernity, with skyscrapers taking over the old districts and shoreline she knew, and this is where her journey begins.