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Richard Hammond’s Wild Weather – final, SBS One, 7.30pm
The Top Gear test dummy turns his attentions to the word on everyone’s lips, climate, in this three-part series. But not in a political sense. Hammond’s interest is in explaining how weather happens, as if addressing a group of disengaged year 9 students. He sexes up the dull science stuff by blasting two metal tables in a quarry with a ring of gas burners and demonstrating how paper helicopters can hover in the hot-air pocket created above. The sight of the helicopters spinning against a backdrop of red earth is lovely, and Hammond’s boyish delight is infectious. His explanation of how Sahara Desert sand ends up caking cars parked in Bristol is interesting. It’s an easy way to absorb weather phenomena.
Gallipoli – finale, Nine, 9pm
Kudos to Channel Nine for its dedication to the dramatic reinterpretation of Australian history, from the war campaigns that apparently shaped our national identity, to the media moguls and mining magnates who shaped our minds and our economy. This seven-part series marking the 100th anniversary of the notorious World WarI battle against the Turkish army is well scripted and shot. However, it did not rate terribly well and was subsequently pushed forward in the schedule, so that tonight’s double-episode finale quickly wraps up the familiar story. From the young actors playing the terrified boys on the brink of death, to the veterans portraying the officers in whose hands so many lives dangled, the cast is excellent. The horror is brought chillingly home by protracted personal storylines, and the intense focus on a single face, that of actor Kodi Smit-McPhee as Thomas “Tolly” Johnson, during the battle scenes.
Elementary, Ten, 10pm
This second episode of the third season of the slick contemporary US retelling of Sherlock Holmes opens with a shot of hot chicks sword-fighting. It is a taste of what is to come – later, another hot chick furiously paints to a punk soundtrack. It turns out she is painting a chest of drawers, but no matter, she’s still a sultry distraction from the formulaic plot, which tonight involves a children’s toy maker, selling beads of dubious fair-trade origin, and a double homicide.
Bridget McManus
PAY TV
Sarah Beeny’s How to Sell Your Home, LifeStyle, 8.30pm
Sarah Beeny follows various Brits as they try to flog their homes. In Nottingham a couple who overpaid and then spent another £30,000 ($59,000) on renovations know that they’re going to make a loss. In East Sussex a cash-strapped woman is determined to get ridiculous money for a cottage that looks in need of a good bulldozing.
The Walking Dead, FX, 8.30pm
Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Aaron (Ross Marquand) are trying to catch a horse which has somehow been surviving out in the woods. But really it’s Daryl who is the skittish, feral creature that refuses to come in from the monster-haunted wild. Elsewhere, Carol (Melissa McBride), who has been masquerading as a helpless housewife in a floral sweater, is forced to bare her teeth in memorable fashion.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Winter’s Bone (2010), SBS2, 10.15pm
Shot on location with documentary-like authenticity, Deborah Granik’s independent drama Winter’s Bone, adapted from the novel of the same name by Daniel Woodrell, is a grimly uplifting coming-of-age tale set against the rural backdrop of America’s Ozarks mountain range, where the production, distribution and consumption of methamphetamine has left the landscape damaged, families incomplete and society’s bonds broken. Jennifer Lawrence, in a performance of strength that comes with flashes of defiant humour, is Ree Dolly, the 17-year-old dropout trying to support a family where her mother has had a mental breakdown and the family home is to be repossessed because her father, a renowned meth cook, has gone missing while on bail. Her quest to find out what has happened to him takes Ree up against her own extended clan, who as in other battlegrounds with minimal law enforcement (i.e. Afghanistan) have become a law unto themselves, with only her quiet, fearsome uncle, Teardrop (John Hawkes), as a possible source of help.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Fox Classics (pay TV), 10.45pm
1957’s Bridge on the River Kwai is a better example of how David Lean was drawn to the very British establishment that he felt compelled to condemn, but Lawrence of Arabia has the obvious hallmarks of an epic, from Freddie Young’s cinematography to the blazing, quasi-theatrical central performance by a young Peter O’Toole as the renegade British officer who worked with the various Arab tribes to help drive the Ottoman empire from the Middle East during World War I. Lawrence of Arabia is a movie defined by scale, from the way a single speck on the horizon slowly reveals itself as a man to the grand charges of guerillas across a plain towards victory.
Lean could obviously identify with the force of one man’s personality carrying all before him – after all it was how he got his films made – but the toughest scenes here are ones that show how the ruling system will eventually triumph; the desert tribesmen eventually capture Damascus but they have neither the training nor the inclination to oversee a modern city, allowing the diplomats of France and Britain to bring the next wave of colonialism to bear. Historians still debate what may or may not have happened to Lawrence when he was captured by the Turkish army, but the film clearly suggests that he was sodomised, an event that fractures his already heightened ego and sends him on a frenzy of destruction. Such are the ways of military leaders.
Craig Mathieson