FREE TO AIR
Upper Middle Bogan, ABC, 8.30pm
This gem of a culture-clash comedy deftly achieves a gratifying balance, displaying both a warm heart and a sharp eye for social mores in two distinctly different middle-class Melbourne families. While astutely detailing the contrasts in lifestyles and values between the Wheelers and the Brights, it also conspires to create surprising and delightful connections between its characters, played by a spot-on ensemble. In the fourth episode of the second season, Shawn (Dougie Baldwin) agrees to participate in the family business of drag racing in order to defend the Wheelers' honour against the boastful broccoli king, Benji Amenta (Steve Bastoni), and his preening son, BJ (Robert Tripolino). The episode also finds Edwina (Lara Robinson) casting a longing eye in the direction of the dancing broccoli heir but finding her own fulfilling path with assistance from the magnificently brusque Amber (Michala Banas).
The Fall, SBS One, 9.30pm
In crime fiction, the juxtaposition of a calculating criminal and the troubled detective on his trail is a familiar opposition. In this quietly gripping Irish-English thriller, it's effectively played out by a strong cast that writer Allan Cubitt and director Jakob Verbruggen envelope in an atmosphere of icy tension. The five-part series features a muted colour palette and a world full of pain. With tormented cops trying to keep the peace in a city gripped by fear, the coolly capable and slightly remote detective superintendent Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) is assigned to Belfast to help solve a series of murders. She goes methodically about her business, as does father, husband, bereavement counsellor and serial killer Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan). This is the penultimate episode of the first season, which proved such a success that a second is under way.
Soul Mates, ABC2, 9.30pm
The dialogue is whip-smart, fast, cheeky and sometimes profane in this energetic and inventive comedy series from Connor Van Vuuren, Nick Boshier and Christiaan Van Vuuren. There's a nutty array of ongoing sketches, one featuring a couple of cavemen arguing over the nature of God; another a New Zealand spy team who are trying to kill the pet bunny of a young Russell Crowe in order to scar him emotionally enough to ensure he grows into an actor who will do credit to his country. A heady mix that's hard to describe but easy to enjoy.
Debi Enker
PAY TV
Gus Worland: Marathon Man, A&E, 7.30pm
Gus Worland is Hugh Jackman's best mate, a member of Triple M's blokey Sydney breakfast team, and someone Foxtel just can't stop giving TV shows. This time around he's trying to lose a lot of weight – starting at 138 kilograms – with the aim of running the New York City Marathon. But just when you begin to think this first episode isn't quite the pile of boof-headed garbage you feared it would be, it turns around and proves you wrong.
The wheels fall off when Worland gets sent for a "colon cleansing" – a procedure that has no medical benefit and can have life-threatening complications. Depressingly, Worland seems to think the practitioner is a doctor. It's especially disgusting that we hear the water squirting out of him into a metal receptacle while he's talking to the camera. A trip to a GP could have provided Worland with important information about what effects his lifestyle might be having on his heart, lungs, liver and other organs. Instead we get a scene that seems designed specifically to cause discomfort and embarrassment, and to pander to the dumbest of demographics. On that front, it's a gift that keeps giving. Worland blames the procedure for the excessive flatulence that's the focus of a subsequent scene, and it gives Worland's radio colleague Matthew Johns the chance to make a horrible gay joke.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Summer Hours (2009), SBS Two, 1.55am (Friday)
Filled with so much light that it begins to open up the forgotten memories and shuttered corners of the protagonist's lives, Olivier Assayas' fine reflective drama follows the interaction of three French siblings – Parisian economics professor Frederic (Charles Berling), Shanghai-based entrepreneur Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) and the increasingly American-like Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) – who are reunited in the home of their late mother (Edith Scob), which they must decide what to do with even as their childhood recollections and own flaws become entangled. Like several Assayas movies, it is about the world we remember as we deal with the one that has replaced it, and the rituals and certainties of a former French life is contrasted with the necessities, both economic and personal, that have steadily changed the country since the youth of the Marly children. It is not merely nostalgic, but aware of what is lost with time even as the cinematic language elegantly ties back to earlier French eras.
Kelly's Heroes (1970), Turner Classic Movies (pay TV), 10.15pm
A year after making Where Eagles Dare, a respectful if tediously paced World War II turncoat thriller about a group of Allied commandoes attempting to rescue a captured general from a German castle, director Brian G. Hutton and star Clint Eastwood reunited for what is essentially a counter-culture take on the same conflict. During the battle for occupied France following D-Day, a group of US soldiers, overseen by Eastwood's sardonic former officer, learn of a German gold stash, and charge ahead to try and steal it. The tone is flippant and anti-authority, with bribery their chief weapon; Donald Sutherland plays a beatnik tank commander whose unit is hiding out to avoid combat. The cast includes Telly Savalas and Harry Dean Stanton and by the film's end those left alive after a private treaty unimaginable in Where Eagles Dare are heading for Switzerland, treating a subject that a subsequent generation of would venerate with bracing disregard.
Craig Mathieson
