The Friday TV Planner: June 20

By Wendy Roby

Sport, tennis, thwack, cars, sport, run, tennis, rackets, balls, soccer, big cars, whizz whizz, kick, hit, grunt, goal. Even writing that is more interesting than watching the bucket load of sport telly what is on this week. Which is all very ho-hum. Fortunately, I am trufflier than a pig to ferret out what’s worth making a date with your goggle box for, so if you’re ready, deep breath, we’ll begin.

Fixing Broken Britain: A Tonight Special – Sunday, 9pm, ITV1

This is billed as report into Why Teens Go Feral, but is actually a brave attempt by the mother of murdered teenager Sophie Lancaster to find out why some British kids are intent on attacking the life out of each other. Given that this involves Mrs Lancaster trying to seriously investigate our attitude to drinking, gang culture and heaps of other unsavoury traits, why have they described her daughter as being killed ‘just for dressing like a Goth’?


British B Movies: Truly, Madly, Cheaply - Saturday, 9.05pm, BBC4


Quite how two days of B-movie programming merits being called a ‘season’ is anyone’s puzzle. But this is BBC4, for whom we can forgive most things – even a documentary called Can Dogs Smell Cancer?, which takes this week’s Top Title prize and sounds flipping amazing. But that is on Sunday, and this is not. What this does have is cheapo monsters running amok, interviews with Devil Girl From Mars Patricia Laffan and corpulent commentator Michael Winner, who reckons he’s a film director. Silly man.


Snog, Marry, Avoid – Monday, 8.30pm, BBC3


Oooh look, just what we need, another makeover show. This one fancies itself as ever-so nu, because they are doing un-makeovers. Boasting a technical gimcrack called The Personal Overhaul Device, the not-so Big Idea is to strip away the fake tan, hair extensions and fibreglass nails of modern girls to reveal their ‘natural beauty’. It’s all a bit No, civilians, you are DOING IT WRONG, in a world where fake tan is ‘common’ and no one is allowed to leave their house until they’ve passed some sort of ridiculously complicated and totally arbitrary acceptability test. Hosted by Jenny Frost what was in Atomic Kitten and who has obviously put murdering great pop songs on the backburner, it’s enough to make you slap on three extra layers of Superdrug’s Bronzing Milk. Which incidentally, is rather good.


Upstairs Downstairs Love – Monday, 9pm, C4


This, a hold on-to-your-pants rude-u-mentary, is about Victorian barrister Arthur Munby, who developed a less than professional relationship with his charwoman, Hannah Cullwick. But this is less about Master/Servant quickies in the pantry than it is about class fetishism. Mundy catalogued their obsessive affair with a series of diary entries and photographs which reveal a very strange fascination with dirt, drudgery and lowliness – a new one on me as rude quirks go. And yet more proof that the Victorians were far filthier than we will ever be.


AND THE REST….


Top retail wizardry from Mary Queen Of Shops – Monday, 9pm, BBC2

Giles Coren stuffing his smug face in The Supersizers Go Regency – Tuesday, 9pm, BBC2

Kids go Strictly in Mad Hot Ballroom – Tuesday, 9pm, BBC4


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