FREE TO AIR
Brooklyn Nine-Nine, SBS2, 8pm
There’s a golden rule in sitcom – characters don’t change or learn from their mistakes. Allowing them to evolve or improve their station in life spells ratings doom. This is clearly understood by the creators of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, who write scripts for cop characters who revel in their stupidity and drive their chief crazy in the process. The sitcom is far from original, but it sure is funny. A highlight this week is an appearance by Eva Longoria (Desperate Housewives), who clearly enjoys flexing some comedic muscle.
Making Australia Great, ABC, 8.30pm
It’s a blend of politics and economics and its title is almost enough to send you to sleep, but boring this is not. Writer and presenter George Megalogenis offers a slick, intriguing look at how and why Australia has on occasion been the envy of the world, and at other times left us in shame on a global scale. Megalogenis starts by examining how we became the last rich nation standing in the Global Financial Crisis. The final instalment in this three-part series takes a compelling and unexpected turn, however, when Megalogenis suggests we must also learn from a bleak period in our distant past. He takes us back to 1888, when Australia was riding high on the riches of the Gold Rush but squandered its status as an economic power. The day our “luck” began to change was in 1888, when a boat carrying more than 200 Chinese passengers tried to dock in Melbourne. The passengers’ paperwork was ruled bogus, they were refused entry, and legislation was rushed through Parliament to restrict Chinese immigration. The first White Australia policy had been written.
Maximum Choppage, ABC2, 9.10pm
There are some flat spots here, but Maximum Choppage is arguably Lawrence Leung’s most accomplished work to date. It’s a comedy that casts him as Simon Chan, who spends his life terrified his ruthless mum (Kathryn Yuen) is going to discover his true identity. She’s been struggling to keep the family’s Cabramatta beauty salon/DVD store running while Simon’s been in China studying martial arts. Or so she thinks. He’s actually a complete weed – a painter who has been at the Marshall Art School. A solid final episode sees Simon face his biggest challenge yet, fighting a plan to evict Mrs Chan and her neighbours from their shops.
Darren Devlyn
PAY TV
John Torode’s Australia, LifeStyle, 8.30pm
Has there ever been a chef as hungry to learn as John Torode? He’s been away from Oz for 20 years, he knows things have changed, and he’s keen to digest every morsel of knowledge the locals can feed him. A bit of scepticism would have been handy, though – tonight’s episode leaves him and the viewer with a misleading impression of the extent to which Tasmanians used to use abalone as fertiliser (in reality, hardly at all). But not to worry – Torode learns how to cook abalone properly, takes a lesson in sushi from a Japanese master, and uses doughnuts to knock up a rum baba.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
The Train (1964), Fox Classics (pay TV), 8.35pm
John Frankenheimer’s The Train was reviewed here several months ago but, with The Monuments Men screening on Tuesday, it is hard to resist mentioning this remarkable film again. Both are concerned with the rescuing of priceless treasures from Nazi looters during World War II. The Train begins in the dying days of the German occupation of France, when railway inspector Labiche (Burt Lancaster) is ordered by Colonel Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) to prepare a train to take hundreds of masterpieces from French museums and private homes to Germany.
The irony is that these artworks had previously been denounced as “degenerate” by Nazi authorities – they employ abstraction instead of a fidelity to literal reality – but von Waldheim is an officer prepared to think independently. Labiche engages his colleagues in the French Resistance – one played with great pathos by Michel Simon – to stop the theft of France’s cultural heritage. But what begins as a routine adventure yarn – albeit one brilliantly directed, as usual, by Frankenheimer – soon becomes a thoughtful meditation on the cost of noble intentions. The Nazis had a policy of never letting acts of disobedience go unpunished, often executing 100 civilians for every German soldier killed. How many lives will these paintings cost? It will be a fight to the death between Labiche and Waldheim – and between two of the screen’s most powerful actors. This is superior Hollywood filmmaking.
Patrick White’s The Night the Prowler (1978) ABC, 1.05am (Wednesday)
Australia has a long and venerable history of authorial possessives in film titles, which can drive the less-than-pedantic up the wall. But surely it is to this nation’s credit that scriptwriters and novelists are sometimes given such public credit. After all, how many scripts did the Nobel Prize-winning Patrick White write? Two (the second being Big Toys). Not that exclusivity impressed the mainstream critics, who (with one notable exception at the time of David Stratton) tore the film to shreds, claiming this story of a weight-challenged and set-upon Felicity (Kerry Walker) finding liberation on the night streets of Sydney was a vitriolic attack on Australian middle-class values. Why, murmurs were even heard that White was not Australian, but London-born! However, the efforts of such discerning film advocates as Stratton and Adrian Martin have triumphed and the film, directed by Jim Sharman, now has assured status. And why not, given it prefigured by five years aspects of La Belle Captive, made by one of the most important and innovative novelists and filmmakers of the 20th century, Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Scott Murray
