Weekend TV with Dianne Butler

DIANNE Butler reviews your evening television for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

switched martini

DIANNE Butler reviews your evening television for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Friday
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THIS is what happens to your TV viewing after the footy season ends. Friday night in front of Better Homes & Gardens.

Tonight's episode lasts almost as long as a game of football. Considerate of them, thinking of us like that. Plus it's vaguely sports themed.

Fast Ed is going up against two people called James Courtney and Mark Winterbottom making prawn cocktails in this episode. My money's on Ed, given that Ed is a chef and James and Mark drive cars around in circles for a living.

I also like the sound of Karen Martini's lamb - Greek-style, on the barbecue.

Seven's saying she's putting it with her "best-ever" salad, but I think we've all heard that before.

So you'll be in the right headspace to back up for the trial of rapist and murderer Georgios Stelikos on Scott & Bailey. He's a grub, but so's his barrister Nick Savage.

"Looks about as savage as a wet sponge," Scott and Bailey's DCI says as she wishes them luck on her way back to the station. She's obviously not aware that Rachel - Bailey - was having an affair with him for two years.

He dumped her in the first episode, over dinner, before the entree had even arrived. She's the first on the stand tonight and leaves the courtroom reeling, not so much because she perjured herself, but worried Nick saw her bump ... she's pregnant, was going to have a termination and decided at the last minute not to. He, on the other hand, is married with children.

This sordid case doesn't end in the courtroom. There's a related hit and run, or, as Gill the DCI puts it, "Hit and reverse over the body several hundred times and then run".

Both the victim's eyes have popped out. She's never seen that. One, yes, but not two.

Better Homes & Gardens
Channel 7, 7.30pm
Review: 3 Stars.

Scott & Bailey
ABC1, 8.30pm
Review: 3 Stars.

Saturday
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MONROE seems to have found itself some fans. As indeed has Monroe himself, as a kind of fun guy who plays poker and specialises in one-liners. Oh and neurosurgery. Do you think there are many of those around in real life? Not in my experience.

The ones I've met, nobody'd be making a TV series about them. You'd be making a movie, and it'd be like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

If anything, James Nesbitt could've given Monroe a bit more of a rev up. Or the script could've. It's been very safe.

But on the other hand, there's a reference to Shaddup You Face. The Joe Dolce "song". Monroe mentions it tonight, it's completely random. I have missed most of this series though, so there may be some completely rational explanation. I hope so.

What about this bit, do you think this bit's true? That you need these four qualities to be a surgeon - memory, manual dexterity, decision making, and ("most of all") the strength to come through the doors to do it all again after it's gone wrong. I think Monroe said surgeon. Maybe he was taking the juniors through their new job as butchers.

They're all in a flap tonight as they wait to see who's in and who's out. Bremner - the hard yet soft cardiologist - doesn't believe in assessment. "I believe in competition," she says. She's going to let one of them harvest a vein for a bypass. Yes, I'm as excited as you are.

Monroe's doctors are clearly of a higher quality, according to him. He tells Wilson she has the stitching skills of a child sweatshop worker. But Monroe's clearly still rocked by the death of his daughter - will this re-emerge as an issue when another 13-year-old girl is brought in with fixed and dilated pupils?

This storyline's a bit neat, another grieving father sitting there shell-shocked.

Monroe
ABC1, 8.30pm
Review: 3 Stars.

Sunday
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I NEED some of that software Mr Finch developed for the US government to predict for me whether Person of Interest is going to remain a Program of Interest for Channel 9. And therefore for us.

I got into this series with the pilot. Anytime there's a corrupt cop, I'm there. Of course, I would've had to stop watching it if Jim Caviezel - Reese, the star of the show - hadn't shaved. Too beardy. He could have gone on Undercover Boss in his homeless man disguise, those kids from the subway had no idea. Even that detective, Carter, she walked right past him. He didn't fool Finch though. But he's played by Michael Emerson from Lost - you wouldn't expect to get anything past him.

And then I had concerns - based on statements Finch made about Reese's "doubts" about his work as a special ops agent, and about how he didn't like firearms, and Reese said he didn't either - that he may have become a soft-shell pacifist, bludgeoned into morning drinking by the Pentagon. But then he walked in on that small arms deal, where he mentioned to one of the neophyte buyers that he was holding his handgun sideways, and what would happen if he fired it, and it was on. Fantastic scene. Backed up by another one, where Reese stood in the middle of the road and blew a hole in the windscreen of an oncoming 4WD, like he was Arnie and it was 1984.

We've seen a lot of UK shows use security cameras as a plot device, but Person of Interest isn't like that. Plus it goes deeper. How deep, we don't know yet, but I'm hanging around to find out. This isn't some tired old concept underpinning the weekly rescue mission here. Sure, there are similarities to a couple of action movies you may have seen. But it taps into post 9/11 fear and paranoia and that thing that happened here and everywhere - just how much we all traded privacy for safety. Never getting that back.

Person of Interest
Channel 9, 9.30pm
Review: 4 Stars.