The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up to Cancer
This latest fundraiser sees some proper A-list names entering the tent, hoping to savour a handshake and avoid a soggy bottom. Joining the likes of Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall, comedians Rob Beckett and Tom Allen, and DJ Nick Grimshaw, will be Hollywood actors Daisy Ridley and James McAvoy.
Tuesday 9 March, 8pm, Channel 4
Return to Dunblane With Lorraine Kelly
Kelly was one of the reporters on the scene as the Dunblane tragedy unfolded back in 1996. On its 25th anniversary, she pays a return visit to speak to survivors of the shooting and people who lost loved ones. Expect deep sadness but inspiring levels of resilience, too.
Thursday 11 March, 9pm, ITV
The One
Based on author John Marrs’s psychological thriller, this new sci-fi drama explores the concept of the perfect match. After scientists discover that everyone has a gene matched with one other person, a simple DNA test can lead to the perfect partner and true love. But can it also mask deadly secrets?
Friday 12 March, Netflix
The Great
The “anti-historical” historical drama, based loosely on the rise to power of Catherine the Great (played here by the Golden Globe-nominated Elle Fanning), finishes its excellent first series. While the plot against the spectacularly stupid Peter (a brilliant Nicholas Hoult) gains momentum, Catherine is surprised to find out she might be pregnant.
Sunday 7 March, 9pm, Channel 4
Last Chance U: Basketball
The documentary strand that examines the way sport can offer positive life opportunities examines a college basketball programme full of talented kids trying to navigate their late teens and hit the big leagues.
Wednesday 10 March, Netflix
The Dog House
A return to the Wood Green animal charity as it looks to match some more mischievous mutts with needy owners. As well as digging into the reasons behind people wanting a dog or, more tearfully, why they need to give one away, we hear about the dogs’ journeys, too.
Thursday 11 March, 8pm, Channel 4
Jimmy McGovern’s Moving On
Another run – series 12, no less – for renowned TV writer Jimmy McGovern’s compassionate, beautifully observed dramas. Expect quietly devastating stories exploring pivotal moments. McGovern’s work can be dark but it’s consistently rewarding, too.
Monday 8 to Friday 12 March, 2.15pm, BBC One
The Celebrity Circle for Stand Up to Cancer
Channel 4’s head-scratching reality show, where anyone can be anyone, returns with a celebrity spin-off. Residents moving into the block of flats include the rapper Lady Leshurr and Made in Chelsea’s Sam Thompson.
Tuesday 9 March, 9.15pm, Channel 4
Love in the Time of Corona
Filmed last June, this Star original comedy focuses on the early stages of lockdown and its implications for people looking for love. While one couple decide it’s time to start a family, another are trying desperately to hold their marriage together.
Friday 12 March, Disney+
Fern Brady: Power & Chaos
As part of the BBC’s cross-platform, mood-lifting comedy season, some acerbic standup from the rising Scottish comedian Fern Brady. Touching on sex, sexuality, social media and scandals, it’s a frantic, gloriously chaotic hour of comedy that chimes perfectly with 2021. Also showing Thursday, 10.30pm, BBC Scotland, and Friday, 11.30pm, BBC One.
Tuesday 9 March, BBC Three
Podcasts
Renegades: Born in the USA
There seemed a certain inevitability about these two icons of liberal America – Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama – getting together to make a podcast. Over eight episodes, the Boss and the former president talk about everything from the origins of their friendship to modern manhood and the prospect of unity in a post-Trump United States. Plenty to get their teeth into, then.
Weekly episodes, Spotify
In Writing With Hattie Crisell
The lifestyle of a writer is often romanticised. Thanks to these interviews with novelists, journalists, songwriters and screenwriters, every element of a professional’s routine is revealed, from Lucy Prebble’s description of the Succession writer’s room to Grace Dent’s fondness for working in bed.
Weekly, available widely
Today in Focus: Freshwater
This investigation by Anushka Asthana looks at a possible miscarriage of justice linked to a cocaine haul. In 2011, five men were sentenced to a total of 104 years for conspiracy to import £53m-worth of cocaine. They maintain their innocence, and with an appeal about to be heard, this five-part pod looks at the evidence.
Weekly, The Guardian
The Wind
Host of Van Sounds and USA Today’s pod The City, Fil Corbitt recently wrapped up the first season of this pod focused on the art of listening. Richly recorded on a makeshift desk in the middle of the woods, it explores people’s relationship to what they hear, be it gender-neutral language, yodelling or the call of the coyote.
Weekly, available widely
In Focus With David Yarrow
The intrepid fine art photographer David Yarrow has seen a lot of things that no one else has seen. He has taken photographs inside North Korea, snapped a killer whale and looked into the eyes of a polar bear. Of course, the stories surrounding these snaps are pretty spectacular, too, and Yarrow tells them here in engaging fashion.
Weekly, available widely
Film
Notturno (Cert TBC)
(Gianfranco Rosi) 100 mins
This perceptive documentary bears witness to life in the Middle East’s conflict-eroded borderlands. It was shot in Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon but is studiously unspecific as it spends time with the broken and the barely surviving: psychiatric patients, a duck hunter and, heartbreakingly, children who recreate the horrors of Isis in simple drawings.
Mubi
Into the Darkness (15)
(Anders Refn) 152 mins
The first in Refn’s two-part dramatic reckoning with Denmark’s second world war starts in 1940 as the Germans invade, and factory owner Jesper Christensen’s bourgeois family are torn between collaboration and resistance. It might have worked better as a TV series but it’s a solidly made saga.
On digital
Coming 2 America (12)
(Craig Brewer) 110 mins
Eddie Murphy’s 1988 culture-clash comedy has a tardy sequel. Now king of his African state, Akeem (Murphy) returns to New York to find the son and heir (Jermaine Fowler) he never knew about. Murphy and Arsenio Hall (as sidekick Semmi) again open the dressing-up box for multiple roles.
Amazon Prime Video
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché (12A)
(Celeste Bell and Paul Sng) 89 mins
The groundbreaking singer of 70s punk group X-Ray Spex gets her due in this intimate doc fronted by her daughter, co-director Bell, with diary entries voiced by Ruth Negga and an impressive array of witnesses.
On digital/Sky Arts
Iorram (PG)
(Alastair Cole) 96 mins
This lilting Gaelic-language doc pairs audio interviews from 1947 to 1975 with modern footage for an oral history of the fishing communities of the Outer Hebrides. A mournful air pervades songs and stories of catches, clearances and lives lost at sea.
On digital
Dreams of a Life
Carol Morley’s 2011 drama-documentary tells the distressing tale of Joyce Vincent (played by Zawe Ashton), whose corpse was found in her London flat three years after she had died. How had she gone unmissed for so long? And what does that say about our society? Morley talks to people who knew her to try to reveal the true face of a lost soul.
Sunday 7 March, 1.25am, Film4
