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The Real Man's Road Trip, SBS One, 8.25pm
British comedians Jon Richardson and Sean Lock (as seen frequently on QI)swap their comfort zone of the London comedy circuit for the wilds of Louisiana to hang around with creole cowboys. Bull castrating, the dry wit of cowpokes on a different comic wavelength, boot shopping and a fair helping of zydeco –flavoured with the boys' slightly wet and pathetic humour – make for engaging and hilarious viewing. Lock's reaction to Richardson trying to do his "sometimes I say 'a nonion' when I mean to say 'an onion"' routine for the Creoles is eye-watering stuff. Next week: swamp hunters and gator stakes.
The Blacklist, Seven, 8.30pm
So it turns out that Berlin – Raymond "Red" Reddington's arch nemesis and the embodiment of ultimate evil – is not so ultimate after all. Throughout this season and last, Berlin has been Red's secret focus, the real agenda behind his efforts to manipulate and ingratiate himself with the FBI. Get Berlin (Peter Stormare), and Red (James Spader) can retire to some cultured enclave on a Mediterranean island where he can sip cognac and listen to Mahler without having to look over his shoulder ever again. But we learned last episode that Berlin's daughter, whom he thought was murdered by Reddington, is not dead, and now Red and Berlin are hunting whoever set them against each other. The ultimate ultimate evil, presumably. (Alan Alda's Fitch, anyone?) This tendency to heap evil upon evil, ramping up the threat and the stakes then unwrapping the layers to reveal a yet worse threat is not new in either television land or the real world. The need to devise ever-escalating dangers is how the hegemonic class justifies its own violence and reinforces its own position of power. If we learn nothing else from The Blacklist we should learn that. Gordon Farrer
Castle, Seven, 9.30pm
Castle goes undercover at a primary school to try to learn just what, if anything, a young kid might know about the murder of an ice-cream seller. Yes it's a premise we've seen before, but thankfully this is more Kindergarten Cop than 21 Jump Street (although it would have been fun to see Frank as a student) and Nathan Fillion is clearly having a ball with all the pratfalls and slapstick. A lot of fun as well as a decent mystery.
Scott Ellis
PAY TV
The Awesomes, Comedy, 9pm
A moderately amusing episode of the superhero comedy cartoon created by Seth Meyers (Saturday Night Live) and Michael Shoemaker (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon). Weakling superhero Prock (Meyers) and his league of misfits are about to lose their government funding because they are below statutory minimum strength now that Hotwire (Rashida Jones) is missing. The short-term solution is to recruit Prock's bete noire, Perfect Man (Josh Meyers), but when Perfect Man is charged with treason, Prock finds himself defending a doofus whose blithe bigotry can only alienate the jury. There are some decent gags (particularly the ones about Perfect Man's prejudice against Atlantic Islanders), but the show needs a lot more of them.
Beyond Magic with DMC, National Geographic, 9.30pm
Magic, it would seem, is something best observed live. On TV, even the best illusions are undermined by the possibility of trick photography and editing and of all those People Who Have Definitely Never Met the Magician Before being paid actors. Yet TV magic remains stubbornly popular, and fans of the genre will no doubt dig this new series from British illusionist Drummond Money-Coutts, aka DMC. Tonight he starts off in London performing some nifty Asian-inspired tricks.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Touching the Void (2004), ABC2, 10.05pm
After One Day in September, his excellent assemblage on the terrorist strike at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games and the tragically fumbled response by German authorities, Scottish filmmaker Kevin MacDonald turns to the daunting Peruvian peak, Siula Grande, which almost claimed the lives of two British climbers in1985. The story of how Joe Simpson and Simon Yates stayed alive is incredible, a paean to the will to survive. MacDonald uses ahybrid format, mixing the testimonies of the two climbers with recreations using actors and it's a winning combination: the actors (without dialogue) and, just as importantly, the actual locations provide an impressive verisimilitude – both the sense ofscale and dread are clearly communicated – while the real Simpson and Yates are humbly matter of fact about their ordeal ina very British way.
Jobs (2013), Masterpiece Movies (pay TV), 2pm
As a film, it's an iFail. For this biopic, writer Matt Whiteley and director Joshua Michael Stern had access to Walter Isaacson's authoritative 2011 biography of Steve Jobs, the demanding and inspired tech visionary who helped found Apple in the 20th century, lost his way and then returned to make the company a computing and design powerhouse in the 21st century. There are cutting lines and historically accurate scenes, but Jobs is played by Ashton Kutcher, a middling comic actor with less dramatic presence. The best thing about his performance is that he effects his subject's distinctive gait. Kutcher fails, however, to capture the contradictory nature of a man who could inspire complete dedication and abject terror, and who was able to dedicate himself completely to new hardware even at the expense of his own family. There's a solid turn from Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak, Job's good-hearted geek collaborator, but it's a sadly uninspiring film.
Craig Mathieson