SATURDAY NOVEMBER 19
Keeping Up with the Joneses (TV1, 7.00pm). Finally, the proper definition of reality TV: life on a cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia, which might as well be Mars to us. A camera crew follows the Jones family – Milton, Cristina and three-year-old “Little Milton” – from the end of the wet season to the start of the dry season, when mustering takes place. Highlights include trapping a rogue croc, collecting croc eggs, and mustering by helicopter and on horseback.
Inside New Zealand: Inside Child Poverty – A Special Report
Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare (TV1, 8.00pm). Not the proper definition of reality TV: Sarah Beeny (from Help! My House Is Falling Down) has an arbitrary six months to do up her ageing pile near Hull. Rise Hall has dry rot, collapsing floors, a leaky roof, rotten windows and structural problems. Gosh, do you think she’ll do it in time?
Rhodes Actor Singer (Maori, 8.30pm). Maori Television’s Pakipumeka Aotearoa series continues a profile of baritone opera singer Phillip Rhodes. In 2007, Rhodes won the Lexus Song Quest and was then mentored by the Dame Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation. He overcame many obstacles to get there, having been adopted, along with his five sisters, when he was five. In the doco, Dame Kiri discusses the foundation, and his first singing teacher, Jill Tobin, is also interviewed.
Lewis (Prime, 8.40pm). Back to the weekend repeats of Lewis, but what the hey – at least there’s all that pretty Oxford scenery to enjoy. It’s back to season three, and the Czech barmaid murdered with an antique Persian mirror stolen from a professor of comparative religion.
The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After (History, Sky 073, 9.30pm). It seems programme-makers never tire of going over and over history’s most famous assassination, and yet we never learn anything new. See this as a companion piece to The Kennedys on Prime (Tuesday, 9.40pm) – The Kennedys: What Happened Next, perhaps. The documentary follows a timeline of the 24 hours following the 1963 assassination of JFK in Dallas, Texas, when Vice President Lyndon B Johnson was told of the President’s death, and his decision to take the oath of office in Air Force One alongside the former First Lady. The photograph of that moment has become iconic, especially as Jackie Kennedy is still wearing the pink Chanel suit – now bloodstained – that she wore in the Dallas motorcade.
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 20
Rick Stein’s Spain (Prime, 7.30pm). The ebullient Stein is in America’s Cup country, Valencia, where there is a paella festival. Yes. We celebrate rugby; they celebrate food. Heading towards the middle of the country, there are windmills, a grape harvest and a man from La Mancha who shows Stein the best garlic soup in the world. He ends his journey in Seville.
Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (Food Television, Sky 009, 7.30pm). The macho New Yorker often just seems uncomfortable, and has some pretty funny ideas about the places he’s visiting, but he’s game nevertheless. In season seven of this food travelogue series, he goes everywhere from Chernobyl to Vienna to Boston.
Time Team (Living, Sky 008, 9.30pm). With so many layers of history to peel back, it’s no wonder Time Team is now in its 18th season, plus there’s the charm of seeing proper British eccentrics at work. Tony Robinson and the team, which includes wild-haired archaeologist Mick Aston, uncover archaeological digs over the course of three days. In this series, they begin with episode No 200, and double their celebration with the first stone henge to be discovered in the UK in a century. The site is the bed of a Devon reservoir, where an assortment of prehistoric remains are found. As is often the way, the site had been discovered by a member of the public, but there were many obstacles, not least that the reservoir had to be drained. Consequently, it was a very muddy dig, but yielded such prehistoric goodies as a stone circle, stone rows, burial cairns and a mysterious mound covered in ancient flint tools. It transpires, after a lot of digging, that the site had been occupied for thousands of years. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers camped there, and in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, it was developed for ritual use. The series also includes an episode in which author and historian Philippa Gregory helps the team piece together the story of the powerful Greys, a medieval family connected to the Tudor Dynasty and which produced Lady Jane Grey, who was known as the Nine Days Queen. In a more modern episode, Robinson decides he would like to excavate a German anti-aircraft battery built during the Nazis’ five-year occupation of Jersey. What they discover is a fortified settlement basically built with slave labour that was home to thousands of German soldiers.
MONDAY NOVEMBER 21
Decision 2011 – The Leaders Debate (TV3, 7.00pm). TV3 seems to have decided the election is boring and is leaving it till the last week of campaigning to get the pollies into the studio. John Campbell, of course, moderates this debate between Phil Goff and John Key and, awesomely, they’re bringing back the worm. Or rather, some sort of technical doodad that tracks the responses of a panel of undecided voters. Afterwards, Campbell, Duncan Garner, Therese Arseneau and Paul Henry will chew over the party leaders’ performances. In other election coverage this week, TV1 screens its final leaders’ debate on Wednesday at 7.00pm. It’s calling it The Decider, which just makes us think of Jon Stewart’s imitation of George W Bush.
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 22
Inside New Zealand: Inside Child Poverty – A Special Report (TV3, 7.30pm). With the election almost on our doorstep, Bryan Bruce (The Investigator) goes into battle for the kids with this special Inside New Zealand report. And with an estimated 230,000 children – the populations of Wellington and Dunedin cities combined – living in beneficiary-based households, it’s a fight worth having. Our record on child health is appalling. We rank 28th out of 30 countries in the developed world, behind Italy, Ireland and the Czech Republic. More than 25,000 children were admitted to hospital last year for respiratory infections, most caused by overcrowded living conditions. Doctors are seeing such diseases as rheumatic fever and scabies, which have largely been eliminated from European countries. Bruce visits one of the country’s poorest and sickest areas, East Porirua, where a decile one school provides 1000 breakfasts a week. But this is charity work, and when sponsors pulled out, principal Sose Annandale had to find the $70-$100 needed each week to give her pupils a full belly in the morning: “Children will not be ready to learn if they are hungry,” she says. “I feel like I don’t have any choice.” He finds families living in mouldy, cold homes they cannot afford to heat. To keep warm at night, it is standard practice to all sleep in one room, a recipe for the spread of disease. Overcrowding, says Michael Baker, Associate Professor of Health at Otago Medical School, is the main risk factor for meningitis, rheumatic fever and tuberculosis. Just to rub it in, Bruce visits Sweden, where health services have been integrated into the school system, where healthcare is free up to age 18 and where scabies haven’t been seen since the 70s. Bruce blames political decisions made in the past 30 years for the poor state of child health today. We’re at a “moral crossroads”, he says, and with those statistics coming out of our land of plenty, it’s difficult to disagree.
NCIS (TV3, 8.30pm). The make-up department were very busy for this episode, which flashes back 10 years to the first meeting between Tony (Michael Weatherly) and Gibbs (Mark Harmon). Cue de-lined faces and dark wigs.
We Shall Remain (Maori, 8.30pm). The PBS documentary about Native American history finishes with the 1973 occupation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, an action by the Oglala Lakota designed to bring attention to grievances. The site was, of course, chosen for its symbolic reference to the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. The occupation lasted 71 days, and was given a huge boost by Marlon Brando, who asked Apache actress Sacheen Littlefeather to speak on his behalf at the Oscars that year (he won for The Godfather).
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 23
Hot in Cleveland (TV2, 8,00pm). We must like Hot in Cleveland because TV2 is rolling straight into season two of the show that Slate magazine described as “a retro casserole tapping into a popular appetite for leftovers”. It does have that old-fashioned cookie-cutter sitcom format that Chuck Lorre has perfected with Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, and it’s not quite as clever, but there’s definitely something nice about a group of women making funny about the ageism of Hollywood. Besides, anything with Betty White in it has to be worth watching. Special guest star tonight is Mary Tyler Moore.
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 24
Journos (TVNZ 7, Sky 077, 10.05pm). This who-watches-the-watchmen documentary series follows five Australian journalists working around the globe. It begins with SBS Dateline reporter Sophie McNeill, who was shooting her first documentary when she was just 16, inspired by the John Pilger documentary, Death of a Nation, that she saw when she was 14. McNeill now works with a lightweight video camera, researching, filming and directing the stories by herself.
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 25
WANNA-BEn: Politician (TV3, 10.00pm). Ben Boyce does for politics what he did for rugby. Which is not a lot, really, except provide a diverting half-hour before the big day tomorrow. Passing on sage advice are Phil Goff, Winston Peters and Hone Harawira. “It looks like a pretty sweet gig,” says Boyce. “You get a free BMW and a RadioLive slot to talk about cats.”
Supernatural (TV2, 10.30pm). It’s big finale time, and Supernatural always likes to go out with a bang. Season six ends with a really big reveal about Castiel (Misha Collins), who has been getting ideas above his station. Fun demon Crowley (Mark Sheppard) also puts into action his plan to open Purgatory (“Vast, unutilised and Hell-adjacent”), and Sam (Jared Padalecki) is fighting battle with himself. In his mind.