Saturday, March 4
MARTIN SCORSESE: TRUE CONFESSIONS, BBC2, 10pm The BFI is holding a retrospective of Scorsese’s work and this programme has been made to complement it, with the film critic, Nick James, interviewing the great director in front of an audience where they discuss, with humour, his half-century of work.
When you consider the list of his films it’s hard to believe they all stem from one man: Goodfellas; Raging Bull; Taxi Driver; Mean Streets…so what’s his secret?
We see most of his films have a troubled, haunted protagonist and are stuffed with such iconic scenes that they have stamped themselves on popular culture.
The interview covers his childhood as an asthmatic boy in Little Italy, goes on to his first film at just 25, and offers priceless anecdotes like the improvisation which led to De Niro’s famous “You talkin’ to me?” scene.
Scorsese seems casual and funny, being led to the stage through the noisy kitchens – no grand entrance for him – and then making the audience chuckle with his colourful stories.
FOLLOW THE MONEY, BBC4, 9pm
Usually I love BBC4’s foreign dramas and it always seems like a loss when the 9pm Saturday slot is handed over to some music compilation show, but this one, when its first series went out last year, was just far too dry and complicated. Perhaps we’re conditioned to expect murders in our imported shows which are then gradually and satisfyingly solved – but this one was about money and banks and fraud and financial regulations…ugh!
The Danish series is back tonight for a second series and this time, instead of the monstrous and complex financial world, the story zooms in on a small carpentry business which has gone bankrupt but the fraud squad are suspicious about its circumstances.
There’s no point pretending this series is as gripping as its Danish predecessors like The Killing and Borgen but some satisfaction can be drawn from its complexity. Just be sure to sit up smart and pay attention at the back!
Sunday, March 5
TOP GEAR, BBC1, 8pm
Oh please, let them have learned lessons from the debacle of last series!
I love Top Gear even though I don’t drive and hesitate between knowing left from right, yet there has always been plenty in the show for people like me but last year’s dreadful series stripped it all away.
The spiky banter between the three pals, Clarkson, Hammond and May, was replaced by awkward, stunted, staged chatter spread out between about 50 presenters. Well, it seemed like 50, but it was actually only six.
The loose and disconnected presenting team who had the chemistry of a padlocked laboratory has been nicely trimmed to three – that ever magic number. It’s Joey, Rory and Chris. (I will simply never get used to calling Matt Le Blanc by his real name. He’s always Joey to me.) The team do an arduous journey across Kazakhstan in cars which have seen better days, and the studio guest is James McAvoy.
SS-GB, BBC1, 9pm
It was a toss-up between the latest episode of this plodding drama and discussing Jeremy Paxman wade through rivers over on Channel 4. I’m aware you don’t all share my crush on Paxo, so let’s look at this week’s adventures in Nazi London.
If this drama hasn’t won you over by now, then it’s never going to. This is the third episode and the maddeningly slow pace rarely changes.
This week, Karl Marx is being exhumed from his London grave with Molotov and Goebbels present for the ceremony. Each episode starts with a great set-piece like this then tends to dwindle, though the inclusion of the atomic bomb secrets does tend to lift things out of the predictable period drama gloom.
Elsewhere, there are concerns about the ailing, imprisoned King, and Archer is involved in an attack inside a tunnel on the London Underground – always a great filming location for tension and fear, but we must all agree the quintessential Underground scene is the famous one from An American Werewolf In London.
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