5 June 2022 35THE BEST TV FROM AMAZON AND BEYOND... MONDAY 6 JUNE
D-Day 360
(PBS America, 8.20pm)
Two years of planning made
the Normandy landings on
June 6, 1944, one of the best
calculated and organised
operations in military
history: 3,000 planes
dropped 23,000 airborne
troops behind German lines;
7,000 ships delivered in the
region of 20,000 military
vehicles and 130,000 allied
soldiers to storm the five
heavily defended French
beaches. Using survivors’
stories, reconstructions and
documents, this astonishing
film focuses on the key strip
of Omaha beach, the exit at
the village of Vierville-sur-
Mer, where American troops
had to negotiate countless
landmines buried in the sand
and miles of barbed wire
while under constant fire
from German forces.
Ian WadeDestry Rides Again
(Film4, 11am)
Later in his career, James
Stewart appeared in tough,
sober westerns, but that was
hard to foresee when he
starred in this lighthearted
horse opera. Its hero is one of
those gentle types the actor
played in his early movies,
so he seems a fish out of
water when he arrives in a
Wild West town to become
its deputy sheriff. The film’s
entertaining story throws
all sorts of challenges at the
lawman; the most exotic of
them is the town’s saloon-bar
vamp (Marlene Dietrich in
a classic role). Dir: George
Marshall (1939) B/WDual (Sky Cinema Premiere,
10.35pm/5.40am)
Karen Gillan gives a double
performance in this Black
Mirror-type satire, the story
of a dying woman who has
herself cloned. The duplicate
version turns out not to be
needed after all, but the rules
entitle her to fight for her life.
Dir: Riley Stearns (2022)
Edward PorterOnly 4, not 5 (Peacock on Sky) Stewart and Dietrich (Film4, 11am)FILM CHOICE
ON DEMAND
The RKO Story — Tales From
Hollywood (BBC iPlayer)
As well as being about the
golden age of the studio
system, this magnificent 1987
documentary captures the
BBC at its own creative zenith,
a period when it could devote
more than three hours of
television time to a second-tier
Will Young — Losing My
Twin Rupert (All4)
Accounts of addiction are
never easy to watch but
this tale proves compelling.
If you have lost someone to
alcoholism, depression or a
combination of the two, you
may also find the comfort
of recognition. It is also good
on the “system problems”
within the NHS that so often
ostracise such patients.
Andrew MaleFairfax (Amazon)
The second season arrives on
Friday, so familiarise yourself
with this adult animation
about fashion-obsessed
California teens. Although
made with love, there are
times when you suspect that
the writers despair of their
characters, and the show is at
its most interesting when it
glimpses at the desperation
and despair that lies behind
their eternally online lives.A Man Escaped (BFI Player)
Fans of The Shawshank
Redemption willing to try a
more austere movie along
similar lines should consider
this drama by the great
director Robert Bresson (the
subject of a retrospective at
the BFI’s London cinema this
month). Its story of a jailed
French Resistance member
(François Leterrier) becomes
a meditation of the workings
of providence. (1956) B/W EPHollywood studio and speak
to a range of interviewees that
includes Katharine Hepburn,
Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell,
Joan Fontaine and Janet Leigh.
Narrated by Ed Asner, it goes
in-depth on the Astaire-Rogers
musicals, Orson Welles, the
Huac hearings, film noir and
the chaos wrought by Howard
Hughes. Amazingly, we are
now as far away from this
BBC golden age as they were
from the heights of RKO.The father of reinvention: orchestrator Charles Hazlewood (Sky Arts, 9pm)Reinventing The Orchestra
(Sky Arts, 9pm)
In this series, the conductor
Charles Hazlewood will,
we are informed, “tear
down barriers” and attack
“antiquated perceptions”. Its
first part, however, is much
less angry than that. Partly
it is a performance of a
Mozart symphony by
Hazlewood’s Paraorchestra,
“the world’s only large-scale
virtuoso ensemble of
professional disabled and
non-disabled musicians”,
with his comments recalling
his enthralling series Classic
Britannia (2007) and The
Birth of British Music (2009).
Interwoven with that are
conversations about the
orchestra as a model of
perfect “teamwork”. This
strand is more uneven, but
the artist Jeremy Deller is a
reliably lively interviewee.
John DugdaleGirls5Eva (Peacock on Sky)
Fun, frothy and alive to
absurdity, this comedy about
a one-hit-wonder girl band
who have well outgrown
girlhood but get a second
chance at the big time is
executive produced by Tina
Fey. Having got the band
together in series one, writer
and Fey mentee Meredith
Scardino dives straight into
lines like: “We are officially in
#AlbumMode, a state of mind
that started when our deal
was announced and ends
when I’m at the Met Gala in a
catheter because my dress is
too complicated.” Together,
the actors Busy Philipps,
Sara Bareilles, Renee Elise
Goldsberry and Paula Pell are
hilarious, menopausal and they
can sing. Classic triple threat.
Helen Stewart
The Art Of Architecture
(Sky Arts, 8pm)
Architect David Chipperfield
is one of his profession’s great
communicators so his report on
his firm’s “surgical” overhaul
of Mies van der Rohe’s Neue
Nationalgalerie in Berlin is
fascinating, and his thoughts on
finding common purpose with
stakeholders essential viewing
for project managers. HSLong Lost Family —
Switched At Birth (ITV, 9pm)
Rosemary always suspected
something was odd with her
family but was unsure, and now
discovers she was evacuated
from a maternity hospital
during an air raid in 1944 and
accidentally switched. While
this is uncommon, we do meet
others who have been through
this heartbreaking ordeal. IWPolice — Elite Raid Squad
(C5, 9pm)
This is a sweet tale of civil
servants fighting crime using
the meagre tools at their
disposal. As one nervous Ealing
Trading Standards officer says
prior to bashing his way into
22 containers on an industrial
estate: “We might end up
finding a pack of biscuits.”
Helen StewartCRITICS’ CHOICE
The lowdown on
Operation Overlord