TV week ahead

Published on Saturday 19 July 2008 13:46

PICK OF THE WEEK

The Wire

FX, tomorrow, 10pm

Initially pitched as a gritty police procedural The Wire's reputation has grown in tandem with its expanding scope. Wandering from its initial beat into areas such as local politics and the decay of the US's public school system, its sweeping ambition and unparalleled sense of detail have turned it into the TV equivalent of the Great American Novel.

Yet, for all the critical hosannas it's prompted, The Wire remains a niche diversion. Buried in the multi-channel hinterlands it hasn't attracted the mainstream adulation afforded Six Feet Under or The Sopranos. But, judging by this extraordinary final season, viewers will still be discovering and discussing it long after its contemporaries have faded into irrelevance.

As before, the show's creator, former crime reporter David Simon, offers us a grim vision of the damage drugs and the war against them have wrought on inner city Baltimore. This time, however, he presents a new prism with which to view this world, revealing the fourth estate's complicity in the death of a metropolis.

As corporate owners gut Baltimore's foremost daily, reporters are bluntly ordered to "do more with less". It's an absurd diktat with grave consequences. And with City Hall implementing similarly destructive policing cuts, the journalists who should be asking awkward questions about Baltimore's decline are driven to some unethical corner cutting of their own.

Still, despite its downbeat subject matter, this final movement of Simon's opus offers genuine cause for jubilation. Superbly acted and intricately constructed, it's a work of lacerating brilliance, unrivalled by anything in recent TV history.

BEST DRAMA

Burn Up

BBC2, Wednesday & Friday, 9pm

With rising oil prices causing turmoil in the markets and stress on the forecourts, this conspiracy thriller comes with a painful sense of relevance. Rupert Penry-Jones stars as Tom, an oil executive who, suspecting that a mysterious massacre in the Saudi desert might be obscuring a more disturbing truth, is soon caught between Neve Campbell's plucky environmentalist and the full force of the petro-chemical status quo.

Deftly scripted by Full Monty writer Simon Beaufoy, it's an intelligent nail-biter with West Wing refugee Bradley Whitford impressing most as an industry hatchet man.

Also try: Dexter (FX, Tuesday, 10pm). More dark escapades with TV's premier serial killer as Dexter, trying to curb his nastier habits, joins a 12-step programme

BEST HUMAN INTEREST

Can't Read, Can't Write

Channel 4, Monday, 9pm

Award-winning teacher Phil Beadle is the man tasked with teaching nine illiterate adults how to read and write, with Beadle alternating between support for his students and anger at an educational system which has utterly failed them.

Also try: John Barrowman: The Making Of Me (BBC1, Thursday, 9pm). The Torchwood star tackles the nature versus nurture quandary, as he explores the factors which shaped his life

BEST ARTS

True Stories: Don't Look Back

More4, Tuesday, 10pm

Following the early model Bob Dylan, film-maker DA Pennebaker captures the iconic singer-songwriter as he tours an austere mid-Sixties Britain. Enlivened with classic concert footage and peppered with sardonic quips from its truculent subject, it's both a riveting record of Dylan and an unsettling account of fame's suffocating burdens.

Also try: The Culture Show (BBC2, Tuesday, 10pm). Legendary British director Terence Davies returns to his native Liverpool to reveal how Merseyside has influenced his cinematic visions

BEST CURRENT AFFAIRS

Dispatches: The Jab That Can Stop Cancer

Channel 4, tomorrow, 8pm

In the coming weeks Britain will begin a programme to immunise 12- and 13-year-old girls against the human papilloma virus, a sexually transmitted disease responsible for 70% of all cervical cancers. Jane Moore ponders the jab's life-saving potential and its risks.

Also try: Panorama (BBC1, tomorrow, 8.30pm). Darragh MacIntyre investigates Heathrow's proposed new runway and asks if the Government's support for the plan undermines its green credentials

TV films

ANGER MANAGEMENT

Today, Five, 9pm

Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, above, go head to head as unwilling patient and devious psychoanalyst in this early peaking comedy of fury. (2003)

THE MACHINIST

Today, Film Four, 10.45pm

Don't be fooled by Christian Bale's buff Batman physique – the method actor slimmed down to frightening skeletal effect to play an emaciated insomniac in this haunting study of paranoia. (2004)

DR NO

Today, STV, 3pm

Sean Connery's 007 debut sees him sent to Jamaica to thwart the handless antagonist, Dr No, leaving just enough time to seduce Honey Rider, who makes her iconic entrance in that much-copied bikini scene. (1962)

THE SECRET GARDEN

Today, Five, 5.15pm

One for all the family, this charming fantasy based on Frances Hodgson Burnett's book, tells the story of an orphaned girl who comes to live with her uncle in his mysterious English castle. (1993)

DIRTY PRETTY THINGS

Wednesday, BBC1, 11.45pm

Who would have thought that Steven Knight, a man who helped create Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, could churn out such a compelling urban thriller about the exploitation of illegal immigrants? Stephen Frears directs Chiwetel Ejiofor as Okwe, a Nigerian hotel worker who tries to protect his Turkish room-mate (Audrey Tautou) from Juan (Sergi Lopez), a man who traffics in everything from kidneys to illegal passports. (2002)

THE RAINMAKER

Friday, BBC1, 11.50pm

Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of John Grisham's novel stars Matt Damon as a fresh-faced law graduate who takes on an insurance company that won't fork out for a bone marrow transplant to help a boy with leukaemia. (1997)

ROSANNA CHIANTA