The Times - UK (2022-04-30)

40 saturday review Saturday April 30 2022 | the times

The Great British

Sewing Bee

BBC1, 9pm

With the contestants reduced

from 12 to 11, Sara Pascoe

ushers them into “sports week”.

Can they fashion eye-catching

high-top trainers in a few

hours? Can they turn a netball

outfit into glamorous designer

daywear? And can they

prepare a jacket inspired by

their sporting heroes, who

include Serena Williams,

Andrew Flintoff, Jessica Ennis-

Hill and Florence Griffith

Joyner? All of which means no

dice for the contestant who

names her sport of choice as

fabric shopping, “because that

can get quite hot and intense”.

DM

Gordon Ramsay:

Uncharted

Channel 4, 10pm

Let this day be remembered

as the first time you saw

Gordon Ramsay cook seared

wallaby in whisky sauce. Or

possibly the second time if

you saw this series, which

visits remote locations for

culinary inspiration, in its first

life on the National Geographic

channel in 2020. Other

adventures for the walking,

fulminating culinary

superbrand as he visits

Tasmania include a trip to

a whisky distillery, diving in

shark-infested waters for giant

saltwater spiny lobsters, fly

fishing for trout and tasting

some sea urchin. DM

7.30 Patrôl Pawennau (r) 7.40 Ahoi! 8.00

Bing (r) 8.10 Cymylaubychain (r) 8.20

Meic y Marchog (r) 8.35 Loti Borloti (r)

8.50 Ben a Mali a’u Byd Bach O Hud (r)

9.00 Sblij a Sbloj (r) 9.10 Y Brodyr Coala

(r) 9.20 Do Re Mi Dona (r) 9.35 Sion y

Chef (r) 9.45 Antur Natur Cyw (r) 10.00

Peppa (r) 10.05 Guto Gwningen (r) 10.20

Oli Wyn (r) 10.30 Octonots (r) 10.45 Cei

Bach (r) 11.00 Dysgu Gyda Cyw: Peppa (r)

11.05 Heini (r) 11.20 Wibli Sochyn y

Mochyn (r) 11.30 Y Brodyr Coala (r)

11.40 Sbarc (r) 12.00 News 12.05pm

Garejis: Dan y Bonet (r) 12.30 Heno (r)

1.00 Cegin Bryn (r) 1.30 Garddio a Mwy

(r) 2.00 News 2.05 Prynhawn Da 3.00

News 3.05 Teulu’r Castell (r) 4.00 Awr

Fawr: Cymylaubychain (r) 4.10 Timpo (r)

4.20 Caru Canu a Stori (r) 4.30 Sion y

Chef (r) 4.45 Fferm Fach (r) 5.00 Stwnsh:

Angelo am Byth (r) 5.10 Rhyfeddodau

Chwilengoch a Cath Ddu 5.30

Mabinogi-ogi a Mwy (r) 5.55 Ffeil 6.00

Y Sioe Fwyd (r) 6.30 Rownd a Rownd

(r) 6.57 News S4C 7.00 Heno 7.30 News

8.00 Pobol y Cwm 8.25 Ar Werth 8.55

News 9.00 Y Llinell Las 9.30 Iaith ar

Daith (r) 10.30 Y Byd ar Bedwar (r) 11.00

Dim Byd i’w Wisgo (r) 11.30-12.05am

Cymoedd Roy Noble (r)

(r) repeat (SL) In-vision signing

● BBC1 Wales As BBC1 except: 10.35pm

BBC Wales Live 11.10 Freeze the Fear with

Wim Hof. The celebrities battle to

maintain their core body temperatures (r)

12.10-1.10am Our Changing Planet (r)

● BBC2 Wales As BBC2 except: 11.45pm

Families Fleeing War (r) 12.15-1.00am

Expedition Rhino: The Search for the Last

Northern White. Documentary (r)

● BBC1 N Ireland As BBC1 except:

10.40pm Stitch, Please! (r) 11.10 Love in

the Flesh (r) 11.55 Our Changing Planet.

Threatened ecosystems in California,

Brazil and Kenya (r) 12.55am Celebrity

Mastermind (r) 1.25-6.00 BBC News

● BBC2 N Ireland As BBC2 except:

11.45pm Weather Watchers (r)

12.05-1.00am Sign Zone: Countryfile (r)

● STV As ITV except: 10.40pm Scotland

Tonight 11.05 Peston 12.00-3.00am

Teleshopping 3.50-5.05 Unwind with STV

● BBC Scotland 7.00pm Roaming in the

Wild (r) 7.30 Scotland’s Home of the Year

(r) 8.00 Inside Central Station (r) 9.00

The Nine 10.00 River City 10.30 FILM

Perfect Sense (2011) 11.55-Midnight Loop

● S4C 6.00am Cyw: Peppa. Animated

adventures (r) 6.05 Guto Gwningen (r)

6.20 Oli Wyn (r) 6.30 Octonots (r) 6.45

Cei Bach (r) 7.00 Odo 7.10 Blero yn Mynd i

Ocido (r) 7.20 Anifeiliaid Bach y Byd (r)

Skyscraper (12, 2018)

Film4, 9pm

“This is stupid,” says Will Sawyer (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson)

during this towering slab of action hokum. Well, duh. Skyscraper

is, after all, the tale of a former FBI agent attempting to scale a

225-storey building that’s on fire and occupied by terrorists, with

his wife and children stranded on the 95th floor and only a roll of

gaffer tape and his artificial leg for company. A more pertinent

question might be: is it fun? The answer is yes. The parallels with

Die Hard are inescapable: building seized by terrorists, authorities

gathered at the bottom, a power cut, an Asian boss figure, family

skin in the game. And, in the middle of it all, a lone ex-cop hoping

that, just maybe, muscles and bloody-mindedness will compensate

for hopeless odds and pathetic resources. (102min) Ed Potton

Films of the day

Picnic at Hanging Rock (PG, 1975)

Film4, 12.50am

Peter Weir’s extraordinary, haunting classic is considered

Australia’s first real arthouse movie. It is set in a girls’ boarding

school in Australia in the early 1900s, when the headmistress

(Rachel Roberts) treats the girls to a picnic in the outback at an

unusual but scenic volcanic formation called Hanging Rock. Pupil

Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert, above) and several other

schoolgirls disappear, walking off as if in a dream and vanishing

without a trace. The cinematographer Russell Boyd enhanced the

film’s ethereal look with the simple technique of placing a piece of

bridal veil over the camera lens. The film launched a mini industry

of explanatory books and homegrown folklore, even though it was

based on a 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay. (115min) Joe Clay

The 1951 Festival

of Britain

BBC4, 11pm

Six years after the end of the

war, Britain needed a pick-me-

up. Hence the Festival of

Britain, a celebration of British

technology detailed here in

a documentary that first

appeared on BBC2 in 2011. You

can see a remnant of the

event’s aims for a bolder,

cleaner-lined future in the

Royal Festival Hall on the South

Bank in London. Gone for ever,

though, is the 300ft-high

Skylon, a cigar-shaped “vertical

feature in steel and aluminium”

positioned by the hall, let alone

the neighbouring Dome of

Discovery, the largest structure

of its kind in the world. DM

Regional programmes

Wednesday 4 | Viewing guide

Critic’s choice Kicking Off: The

Rise and Fall of the Super League

BBC2, 930pm

In our bumper-car past few
years it’s become increasingly
hard to be surprised by
anything that goes on in the
worlds of sport, politics and
business. So all credit to the
European Super League for
taking almost everyone aback
when its putative existence
was announced in April 2021.
And as this documentary
reminds us, it really nearly
was a megamoney shake-up
of European football as we
know it. So how did 12 of the
continent’s biggest clubs,
including six Premier League
teams — Arsenal, Chelsea,
Liverpool, Manchester City,
Manchester United,
Tottenham — secretly group
together in a plan to set up a
yearly tournament designed
to feature the same names for
ever, with no chance of any
other pesky brands — sorry,
teams — butting in? Yes, they
would triple their earnings
from Uefa, but their

suggestion that there would

be some sort of trickle-down

to the rest of the game

convinced almost nobody.

The moment the plans were

revealed the media protested,

the fans rebelled, even some

players within the clubs

rebelled. The British

government joined in to

threaten to outlaw what was

seen as an unprincipled

money grab by a consortium

that included American hedge

funds, Russian oligarchs, Gulf

royalty and European

industrial tycoons. This

documentary promises to

trace in detail the creation,

misadventures and ungainly

end of the European Super

League, and in the process

shine a light on the troubled

nature of modern football

that, hyper-capitalistic though

it may be, made a profit for

only two of the 12 breakaway

clubs last year.

Dominic Maxwell

Catch

up

Maxwell

BBC iPlayer

“The sequence of events,”

viewers are warned at

the beginning of this

dramatised biography of

the last days of Robert

Maxwell, “has been

altered — and some

scenes and minor

characters are fictional.”

But even if this is only

an approximation

of the truth,

Craig

Warner’s

screenplay

provides

a vivid

picture of the last days of

Maxwell and his increasingly

desperate attempts to rob

Peter to pay Paul.

At its heart is a typically

robust performance from

David Suchet, below, building

on his earlier tour de force as

Melmotte in Trollope’s The

Way We Live Now.

If at the start he

is all greed,

cunning and

bullying, by

the end he is

a broken,

near-desperate

individual.

James Jackson

The SS:

A Barbaric State

PBS America, 7.35pm

“You cannot reduce Nazi horror
to the SS,” intones the
voiceover to this documentary.
“Nevertheless, this organisation
was Nazism’s sharpest point.”
Starting with the entire
organisation being found guilty
at the Nuremberg trials in 1945,
this then darts back to the SS’s
rise to prominence at the turn
of the 1930s, when Heinrich
Himmler increased its
membership from 280 to
50,000 in just a few years.
Period footage and talking-
head academics combine to
give an informative overview
of an organisation that spread
the Nazi ideology. DM