Easter long weekend viewing

DIANNE Butler looks at the TV week ahead including Grand Designs Australia, Alcatraz and Agony Uncles.

Agony Uncles

DIANNE Butler looks at the TV week ahead including Grand Designs Australia, Alcatraz and Agony Uncles.

Agony Uncles

Wednesday, April 4
Agony Uncles
ABC1, 9.30pm
3 stars

AGONY Uncles is nowhere near as bad as I'd feared. Nowhere near. And I say that with the knowledge that John Elliott's in it. In it early and often. Right at the start of tonight's episode he promotes the idea of flirting with the mother as the way to winning over the daughter. It disturbs me in a variety of ways.

His son Tom sits there silently next to him. I can only imagine what he's thinking.

As it happens, John Elliott isn't the only Agony Uncle on tonight who advocates this method. Josh Lawson: "You almost talk to the mum the way you would try and seduce the daughter, in a weird way. But take out the sexuality of it."

Ed Kavalee's sitting there listening to this and wisely says nothing. Adam Zwar, who wrote and directs this, and asks the questions, and narrates it, happily has a less pervy route to a good working mother-in-law relationship: pick up a tea towel once in a while.

I also like Waleed Aly's way: "Get a law degree ... Good job ... Doctor. Real doctor, not PhD doctor." He's funny.

Some of them are. Not all though, I need to stress. But some are. Glynn Nicholas, for instance. His line on getting along with mothers: "Because I'm a bit older it isn't so much of an issue, because most of them are dead."

So you've figured this show out by now, I suppose, even if you haven't watched it yet - it's comics, mostly, hovering near or at middle-age, sitting around talking about relationships.

Somewhat late in the game, yes. It's cut with black and white footage from old movies - women in aprons, men in suits, stuff like that.

Kick Gurry, the actor, is particularly insightful about men and male sports celebrities.

Grand Designs

Thursday, April 5
Grand Designs Australia
Lifestyle, 8.30pm
3 stars

YOU'VE forked out more than $3 million for your block of land at Brighton. How much are you going to spend on your house? $160? I don't know how much a five-person tent goes for these days. Plus it's Easter, you're going to pay more right now.

Just kidding. If anyone put a tent up on a piece of land in Brighton, the military would get called in. You know how sometimes on Grand Designs the family lives in a caravan while its dream home is being built? The McKimms aren't that family.

I got confused for a second when I saw the rental they're staying in. It's so beautiful I thought it must be their finished project and I'd gone to sleep and missed the entire show.

Nick's a builder; he and Anna have three kids and this is the seventh house they've done to live in themselves.

Not only is Nick the builder here, he's also the designer, project manager and client.

He's managing eight other building sites as well. "I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about what I have to do," Nick says.

He does have a worried look about him. You would, though. He's also built six other homes in the street he and Anna are about to move into, he tells Peter Maddison, the host of Grand Designs Australia. But this is Nick's first 1960s flat-roofed modernist house.

There's plenty to set the budget racing: tennis court, swimming pool, cantilevering and the tree growing in the middle of it.

It's an interesting project, plenty of money, but I feel as if there are a few gaps.

Some things just seem to happen. Suddenly Peter Maddison's walking up the footpath and knocking on their door. I don't know if it's the house he expected to find either.

Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

Friday, April 6
Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
ABC1, 8.30pm
3.5 stars

THAT father at Dot's church is a real problem. I hope someone accidentally mows him down with a Rolls-Royce and Constable Collins investigates it with the same level of competence he brings to tonight's case.

He and Inspector Robinson (Nathan Page) are trying to figure out whether Cec and Burt's war buddy Thommo was a hit-and-run victim and who did it when across town an old friend of Phryne turns up very unexpectedly at her door.

It's Veronique Sarcelle (Linda Cropper) whose husband Pierre, a painter - this'll shock you - died in mysterious circumstances. A flashback to that night in Paris gives gripping details, and gee, you can't help but get the feeling this may be a case for Miss Fisher. Phryne has one of his nudes on the wall over from where they're sitting.

Pierre's murder, is, after a decade, still unsolved and has just been reopened by the Paris gendarmerie, who have flagged their intention to speak to the three Australian witnesses. Which is much more convenient for Miss Fisher, if she's going to solve it.

Not really a question of if though, is it? More a question of where does the Rolls-Royce fit in and who struck Thommo.

But then someone else turns up dead and an ugly theory starts to take shape. There's already one major suspect, in the well-turned out form of Hector Chambers (Vince Colosimo), a bookie of some notoriety.

But it could be anyone. It could, for instance, be Pierre's crony, painter Rene (Peter O'Brien). Then there's Veronique. She's Phryne's dear friend, but money makes people act in all sorts of ways.

As Veronique says, "I ad to zell zem orrl. Eet broke my art but orr, zee billz!"

(Hauser, Sam Neill, asks an old pianist where he might be able to find a violinist, and the pianist says: "What's the difference between a violinist and a pizza? A pizza can feed a family of five.")

Fifty years on and Doc Soto (Jorge Garcia) has been following his boss Hauser, which will be career limiting if he gets caught. His partner Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones) is at a bar with Nikki the medical examiner but a phone call soon winds up their night: a homicide, girl in a bath with her hair cut off.

It takes them a while to figure out who's killing these women, and they get a few shocks. So do we. About Alcatraz, Lucy, the Warden. Only two episodes to go now.

Dripping in Chocolate

Saturday, April 7
Dripping In Chocolate
UKTV, 8.30pm
3.5 stars

I JUST hope you haven't been saddled with any of that low-grade supermarket confectionary with a cocoa mass of under 3 per cent.

Because, gee, you're going to see some fine chocolate tonight. Handily, one of the main characters is what's prettily known as a chocolatier. Juliana (Louise Lombard) is making some truffles, it looks like - or possibly some bon bons - when tonight's first victim is being dispatched. And not far from her Sydney shop.

She knew the woman, she tells the homicide detective who asks the next morning, but only slightly. They all say that when there's a sharp cop standing in front of them.

And Bennett OMara (David Wenham) should be feeling sharp. He's given up everything, to the point that when he has to chase a suspect tonight he vomits on the footpath.

He even spurns Juliana's treats, and perhaps he's right to. Every time someone's murdered - and there's soon a string of them - there's a trail of her chocs.

It emerges that the girl who died that first night was the face for the campaign for a big new controversial real estate development that will see the bulldozers go through Juliana's chocolate shop.

Juliana turns up at an art opening to confront planning minister Stuart Verger (Geoff Morrell), and would've been thrown out by security if Bennett OMara hadn't also been there and intervened.

But what's Bennett doing there? And why does Juliana walk around with a stash of chocolates on her all the time?

Tell you what, you'll be doing well to guess who did it.

tangle

Sunday, April 8
Tangle
Showcase, 8.30pm
4 stars

ONE's standing next to a bathtub full of water, holding a toaster. Another couple are having sex in front of a video camera on a tripod.

We're now into the third season, and Christine (Catherine McClements) has decided to stand for parliament in the seat formerly occupied by her husband, Tim (Joel Tobeck), who we're only seeing via computer screen from Singapore where he's gone to work and cool his heels.

He doesn't take the news well when she breaks it to him, and neither does their son, Max. "Dad's seat?" is Max's reaction, but as Christine points out, it was her father's seat first.

Not that she should have to explain herself. She also needs her son to help her fake a happy family for a reporter who's coming by the house to do an "At home", and as Christine explains, it's not much of an "At home" if she's the only one there.

Max is living with Nat (Kat Stewart), his birth mother, who had an affair with Tim.

Nat is staying with her sister Ally (Justine Clarke) who has just started a relationship - or something - with her dead husband's brother, Joe (Kick Gurry).

She'd been half-seeing Gabriel (Matt Day) - an emergency medicine doctor who's been in love with her for 20 years, but now she's available, on account of her husband (Ben Mendelsohn) being hit by a van when he was out jogging one morning, he's not that into her any more.

Ally's also spent the past two episodes being humiliated by trying to re-enter the workforce with her rusty science degree. So you can see, possibly, how she's missed what's really going on with her sweet, beautiful children.

Alcatraz

Monday, April 9
Alcatraz
Channel 9, 8.30pm
3.5 stars

THIS one's named Porter, and his IQ weighs in at 162. "That's well above genius," Lucy (Parminder Nagra) says, impressed or something - it's hard to tell.

But the fact she's walking around upright tells us this is 1960 Alcatraz, not present day, where she's still comatose, stashed away in her secret room.

Plus they put a caption up telling us it's 1960. And the other thing is, all the females back then carried handbags wherever they went.

There's Lucy, going into a prison cell to run her eye over a psychotic killer, and there's her handbag swinging off her arm. When did that end? I mean, clearly it hasn't for some of us, but in general?

Porter, she discerns in no time, has tinnitus, and she wants to take him out of isolation to try music therapy. She has to convince the Warden (Jonny Coyne) but he's open to anything. Too much, really.

Melissa George

Tuesday, April 10
Who Do You Think You Are?
SBS One, 7.30pm
3.5 stars

THIS show should only ever do actors, I've decided.

Preferably soap actors, who over-emote. It's Melissa George tonight, whose springboard to international superstardom was her role as Angel on Home and Away, and it couldn't be more fitting, because her family's story, or the stuff we discover tonight, is as dramatic and personal and shocking as a year on that show.

And with dialogue to match: "And Florence is like, 'I can't deal'," Melissa says, talking about one of her ancestors. It's gold.

She focuses on her mother Pamela's side of the family, because she already knows a bit about dad Glenn's side.

They're still in Perth, where Melissa grew up with a brother and two sisters and where her great-great-great grandfather, William Ward, arrived in 1862 to become warder at the miserable, Aboriginal-only Rottnest Prison.

She has only happy memories of going to Rottnest as a kid, but she's slightly nervous about what she's going to find out about Ward and his role there.

On her maternal side she finds another local landmark figures prominently - the Fairbridge Farm School at Pinjarra, south of Perth.

The connection with Australian history makes this episode work, I think.

You may have heard of Fairbridge. It was for orphaned British kids and got very bad press much later on.

Sometimes there was more to it than that.

Melissa finds two Fairbridge children in her family who arrived from the UK. And they have quite a story.