Tuesday January 11
Rules of the Game
BBC One, 9pm
Looking for something a bit different? Some HR-noir, perhaps? This four-part “thriller about sexual politics in the modern workplace” stars Maxine Peake as Sam, a tough, somewhat spiky director of a not-so-modern family-run sportswear business in the northwest. When she appoints a new, forward-looking young woman, Maya (Rakhee Thakrar) to replace the company’s “departed” male human-resources director, there’s immediate resistance – including from Sam herself – to Maya’s more progressive ways of working. Especially in relation to one troubled colleague, Tess (Callie Cooke). But this only comes after we first meet Sam, sitting in the back of an ambulance with a foil survival blanket wrapped around her red silk PJs, having discovered a blood-spattered body in the atrium of her office building. Who the body belongs to, and how it got there, remains a mystery in this overly teasing opener, which works hard to establish the complex relationships between all the principal players in the business but at the expense of dramatic progress. It continues tomorrow but if you’re desperate for more clues, all episodes are available on the BBC iPlayer from today. GO
Raphael: Revealed
Sky Arts, 7pm
Ahead of the National Gallery’s much-delayed exhibition marking 500 years since the great Renaissance artist’s death, director Phil Grabsky takes us on an access-all-areas tour that showcases the works in the exhibition (many on loan from the Uffizi, Louvre, Prado and Vatican museums) and highlights the breadth of Raphael’s talent.
Wonders of the Border
ITV, 7.30pm; not UTV/Wales
Sean Fletcher sets out to walk the 177-mile Offa’s Dyke Path along the border between England and Wales. In tonight’s first of six parts, he starts out on the Severn Estuary and ambles up the Wye Valley through Monmouthshire, meeting fitness fanatics, old rockers and wine lovers.
Digging for Britain
BBC Two, 8pm
Alice Roberts’s survey
of recent archaeological finds continues in the Midlands, starting with an enormous fossil thought to be 180 million years old. She also visits an Anglo-Saxon grave near Cambridge that’s been yielding treasures, a dig in the Roman heart of Leicester, and a unique Iron Age site outside Coventry. It continues tomorrow and Thursday.
The Secret Life of Our Pets
ITV, 8pm
This entertaining four-part series explores the varied relationships between humans and their pets. Tonight’s theme is how we negotiate the complex world of non-verbal communication, and how technology is creating new ways of getting along – from a dog “chatting” with her owner using speech buttons, to a parrot that uses Alexa to add treats to the shopping list.
Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild
Channel 5, 9pm
Tonight, Ben Fogle meets an elderly German couple that few may envy: they’ve spent 40 years creating an off-grid home and nature reserve in a bog on the west coast of Ireland. There they’ve established a unique relationship with the natural world around them but it’s becoming harder to sustain as they get older.
Toast of Tinseltown
BBC Two, 10pm; NI, 11.15pm
Toast’s (Matt Berry) career looks to be on the up, especially when his new agent lines-up a role for him in the biggest romcom of the year – providing his knees pass the audition. Once again, a sprinkling of surprise star cameos adds another layer of delight to the show’s aura of movieland madness.
Hidden Figures (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
Film4, 6.30pm
This film from writer and director Theodore Melfi brings into the light a trio of black female Nasa employees’ contributions to the Space Race via a heavyweight line-up of Taraji P Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe. Henson tops the bill as Katherine G Johnson; Spencer plays computation expert Dorothy Vaughan with stubborn assurance, and Monáe holds her own as engineer Mary Jackson. It’s a heavyweight drama.
Sirens (1994) ★ ★ ★
Great Movies Classic, 9pm
Part of Hugh Grant’s career-launching triptych (Four Weddings and Bitter Moon were also released within weeks of each other in the US), John Duigan’s interwar romance is beguiling. Grant plays the Reverend Anthony Campion, a priest sent to talk sense into Australian artist, Norman Lindsay (Sam Neill), who plans to exhibit a blasphemous painting. Instead, he thrills to Lindsay’s atmosphere of sexual license.
First Man (2018) ★ ★ ★ ★
Film4, 9pm
Because Hollywood can’t get enough of mopey spacefarers (see also Gravity, Ad Astra and High Life), Damien Chazelle’s biopic of Neil Armstrong feels less of a piece. Nevermind, Ryan Gosling plays a thoughtful, methodical Armstrong, while Claire Foy adds an extra layer of texture to his stay-at-home wife, Janet. It’s tastefully and movingly done, but the avoidance of any triumphalism is a little finicky at times. Prepare for a very emotional ending.
