Don't like Wednesdays? Don't like teenagers? Then joy of joys, you'll be in little grump-piggy heaven tonight, because Brat Camp is back. So you can sit around on your lovely comfy sofa, utterly protected from nasty rain and wind and elements of American intense therapy culture, laughing your head off at little British teenage brats who aren't. Protected, I mean. From any of it. Mwa ha ha ha ha.
Sorry, I shouldn't laugh. It's mean. But then, if you can't be mean to teenagers ...
Actually, being a teenager might be just as much fun. What's that? You say you want the TV previews for tonight? No. I don't wanna. I haven't got them, and whoever said I have is a liar. And you're not the boss of me, neither. No, I don't care if you want to know whether Desperate Housewives is worth watching or about that documentary about middle-class squatters in the 1970s on BBC4. Oh GOD! Stop hassling me, right! Take the bloody TV previews for tonight taken from this week's Guide, then, see if I care...
Brat Camp 9pm, C4 The all-girl intake arrive in Utah for, potentially, four months of hiking, camping and humiliating group therapy. Their parents try not to look too relieved as they see them off at the airport. Their problems range from a 20-spliffs-a-day habit to violent outbursts and continual running away. One delightful child hugged her mum while nicking her purse. Camp Aspen is 10,000 square miles of wilderness and they don't like it at all. Gripping but slightly uncomfortable to watch wayward fillies being systematically "broken" by therapy-mad Americans.
Julia Raeside
Hyperdrive 10pm, BBC2 This woefully smug sci-fi comedy reaches its penultimate episode, which sees the crew encounter a genuine celebrity, in the form of understandably stir-crazy "round the galaxy solo spacewoman" Clare Winchester (ho,ho), a part thankfully essayed by the ever-reliable Sally Phillips. Inevitably, comedic mayhem ensues, not least from the ship's computer, which has contracted a virus named Ploppymouth II. Really, is that the best they could come up with?
Joss Hutton
Desperate Housewives 10pm, C4 Maybe nobody had worked out how to keep the momentum after the end of season one, but DH has lost its way. In place of the first series' central mystery, we're too often offered stories that come across like vignettes featuring the main characters. Maybe the who's-in-the-basement? plotline will eventually come good. Meantime, Gabrielle sets off some prison violence, Lynette has the guilts, Susan helps Mike look for Zach and creepy George is back in Bree's life.
Jonathan Wright
The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel, 2004) 8pm, Sky Cinema 1 An Argentinean coming of age tale -- that's adolescent sexuality and Catholicism to you. Amalia (Maria Alche) is the teenager who's getting to grips with her sexual awakening, directing it towards a middle-aged doctor who she is determined to save, or maybe sleep with anyhow. Writer-director Martel weaves in a number of other narrative dramas, but this is mood film-making as much as anything else, casting a dream-like spell. Non-adherents, though, may find it a little slow and impressionistic.
Martin Skegg
Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004) 8pm, Sky Movies 2 Beautifully realised exercise in walking, talking and romance that pitches Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke together for a Parisian brief encounter 10 years after Before Sunrise. He's now an author, in town for a reading, secretly hoping she'll attend. For a sequel that could have got so much wrong, it gets so much right, giving them the space to debate the possibilities of love and the realities of thirty-something life. "I feel like I'm running a small nursery with someone I used to date," says Jesse on his marriage.
Richard Vine
Lefties 9pm, BBC4 In the 1970s, the radical fringe of "a generation that wanted to change the world" squatted a Brixton street earmarked for demolition. Villa Road was a community led by middle-class graduates preaching revolutions both political and personal. Three decades on, Vanessa Engle's extraordinary documentary catches up with former residents. There are inevitably moments of high humour in recollections of right-on living ("We tried to find out where our cervixes were, which was a journey in itself") and the doc arguably doesn't truly address the violence associated with the radical left, but you're also left asking a worrying question: what interesting stuff doesn't happen because we're all feverishly trying to pay inflated rents and mortgages?
Jonathan Wright
___________________________________
Whatever. Cha, man. Bothered. Etc.
