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Clarke & Dawe, ABC, 6.55pm
No costumes, no disguises, no sets. Just two men in suits sitting in a darkened studio, delivering a couple of minutes of priceless political satire. It couldn’t be simpler, and therein lies the brilliance: no one else could do it, and do it so well. So thank the TV gods for John Clarke and Bryan Dawe. They’ve been doing their inimitable thing on TV since 1989, and on the ABC since 1999, initially as a feature of The 7.30 Report and more recently in this pre-news slot. Their two minutes of comedy each week is like a sparkling tonic, offering a unique take on current affairs. Playing a politician, public servant or purported PR expert, Clarke is interviewed by an often exasperated Dawe. Clarke stalls, sputters, spins and obfuscates, generally refusing to acknowledge any problems with his position. Straight-faced but hilarious, this little gem gleams with penetrating insights and mischief.
Gourmet Farmer Afloat, SBS One, 7.30pm
The rugged, remote and sparsely populated west coast of Tasmania is the subject of this episode of Matthew Evans’ water-focused food series. With his mates, Ross O’Meara and Nick Haddow, he continues his voyage around the island, stopping to dive for abalone and fish for the elusive and reputedly delicious local delicacy, stripey trumpeter. Along the way, he provides a potted history of the place and acknowledges the efforts of conservationists in the 1970s to save the area from a proposed dam. Even when the skies open and the seas are less than welcoming, the men appear to be having a fine time.
Outback ER, ABC, 8pm
This gently paced documentary series, shot in the emergency department of the hospital of the mining town of Broken Hill, provides an affecting insight into the people and the place. Capable and caring medical professionals treat an array of patients, from stoic 74-year-old Fay, who falls and breaks her leg when she comes in for a day procedure, to frail 80-year old former mine worker Joseph, who has respiratory disease, to 31-year-old Mark, who’s injured himself in a skate park prank. Nurse Ben Lansdowne observes that “working in emergency, you can see the full spectrum of human populations. You see the best and the worst.” It’s engaging viewing.
Debi Enker
PAY TV
Show of the Week: 12 Monkeys, Thursday, Syfy, 8.30pm
Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film 12 Monkeys was memorable for many things – not least Brad Pitt’s deliciously large performance as Jeffrey Goines, the deranged son of a top virologist. There was Bruce Willis, bloodied, bruised and confused for most of the movie as time traveller James Cole. He was a man flung out of Orwell and into Kafka, sent back to our time not to stop the plague that would wipe out most of humanity but to ... well ... do something related to it. And then there was how dirty and dilapidated everything looked – an aesthetic that suited the grim vision of screenwriter David Peoples (who also co-wrote Blade Runner). The first thing you notice about this TV reboot is how clean and brightly lit everything is. Even the actors look like they’ve been cleaned to within an inch of their lives. The same is true of the narrative path, which seems to have had the bumps and potholes so thoroughly buffed out that the new Cole (Aaron Stanford) and Railly (Amanda Schull) can slide along it in their socks.
So unrecognisably cool, calm and coherent is this Cole that when he kidnaps the good Dr Railly it takes him just a few minutes of screen time to calm her down, get her to believe everything and have her become a full partner in his operation. What was, for the original Railly, a terrifying ordeal at the hands of a volatile, violent enigma is now just two buddies doing a bit of comfy sleuthing. When it turns out that Railly has a pal who can feed her classified government secrets, well, you might start to wonder how series creators Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett (Nikita, Terra Nova) are going to be able to stretch this thing out to 11 episodes. Part of the answer is that they’re going to have another storyline running in the post-apocalyptic future, where hard-bitten scientist Katrina Jones is played by Barbara Sukowa and Cole’s best friend by Kirk Acevedo. In any case, the first few eps do have their pleasures, including Zeljko Ivanek and Tom Noonan turning up as baddies and Emily Hampshire stepping into Pitt’s shoes as the unstable, institutionalised Jennifer Goines.
Great British Bake-Off Masterclass, LifeStyle Food, 8.30pm
Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry step up to the benchtop to show how it’s really done, effortlessly banging out all the tricky cakes, biscuits and things that derailed the contestants in the most recent series of Great British Bake-Off. Tonight Hollywood makes a stripey, two-tone licorice and blackcurrant Swiss roll and two kinds of savoury biscuits. Berry gets on with her cherry cake, fruit and nut florentines and little coffee and walnut cakes. Between them they provide plenty of useful tips and mildly entertaining banter.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Up in the Air (2009), Eleven, 9.30pm
One of the best things great movies do is stay with you forever, sneaking into and tingling your mind when you least expect it. It could be the opening of Citizen Kane where the camera cranes up the imposing gates of Xanadu, or the sound of the white picket-fence gate creaking open in Random Harvest, as Smithy (Ronald Colman) stumbles back to the cottage of great love. It doesn’t have to be an old film. It could be The Imitation Game, where two special boys forge an unexpected and beautiful friendship, or even Up in the Air, with its sensitive portrayal of the loneliest man alive – one dotted with moments that haunt me whenever a plane flies overhead. The primary obsession in the life of Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is his frequent-flyer status. El Dorado is to reach 10 million points as he flies across the US firing people. One can’t say Ryan does this nicely, but he does find solace in being coldly efficient – the glorious Clooney smile revealing a hollowness rarely seen before. This very black comedy from writer-director Jason Reitman examines a post-GFC America in serious corporate decline, forever seeking cruel efficiencies and putting people last. So, why not use the new media to terminate a person’s financial future? It saves on personal contact. While it is tempting to talk only of the film’s bleakness, Up in the Air is also an exhilarating journey, at times starkly funny and occasionally touched by moments of almost-human warmth and decency.
Rashomon (1950) SBS 2, 1.25am (Friday)
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon is one of cinema’s most-revered films, a moody evocation of murder and rape in feudal Japan, where the events are recounted in different ways by various witnesses. The film was confronting in its day because, up till then, audiences had trusted whoever was telling the story – be it the omniscient narrator or one of the characters. Today, we actually delight in finding an unreliable narrator or someone who lies to us(as in Paula Hawkins’ best-selling novel, The Girl on a Train). Given the way the collective unconscious works, it is no surprise that a similarand equally important film was released within weeks of Rashomon: Anthony Asquith’s TheWoman in Question. Here, the witnesses to a woman’s murder notonly recount differently the events they saw, they also describe differently what the victim was wearing, her class and manner. Cinematic twin sisters, Rashomon and The Woman in Question changed forever the way that we saw and understood storytelling.
Scott Murray