FREE TO AIR
Brazil's Next Top Model, SBS2, 5.40pm
Beautiful women vying for affirmation. Catty comments. Obsession with weight, sneaky competitiveness, suspicion when a fellow competitor compliments you. The now-global Best Top Model franchise proves either that some qualities and behaviours are universal to the personality type typically found in the fashion industry, no matter the country, or that the NTM reality TV formula is so closely controlled, the result is the same no matter the culture or language. Either way: ho hum.
Gardening Australia, ABC, 6.30pm
There are only so many times you can do segments on the best time to plant bulbs and brassicas, talk about when to throw a bit of nitrogen on the apple tree or spruik the value of having a worm farm. Yet Gardening Australia has stayed fresh, interesting and informative for 25 years, and even though host Costa Georgiadis is less Peter Cundall than Catweazle-cum-Cat Stevens, he's engaging and enthusiastic. Tonight it's all about fruit trees, productive shrubs and colourful spring corms.
Born in the Wild, SBSOne, 7.30pm
This terrific series about reproduction in the animal world shows there's so much more to know than has ever been shown before. Kangaroos are born after 30 days' gestation, still very much a foetus, crawling over mother's fur and into her pouch where they latch on to a nipple and continue to develop. That's the bit everyone knows. Did you also know kangaroo penises are S-shaped, with a heat-seeking tip? That a jill (female kangaroo) has four vaginas? Or that they can have one joey in the pouch, one out but still suckling, and another in the uterus? Vet Mark Evans and comparative anatomist Professor Joy Reidenberg are our guides through the wonderful world of animal reproductive behaviour and biology, bringing both expertise and a keen eye for the curious detail. The amazing facts don't stop at kangaroos. We also learn that milking koala sperm is "quite a skill" and that koala sex almost always consists of 42 thrusts. The mechanics of echidna sex is the greatest eye-opener. Imagine a piston with four heads that rotates and deposits doses of liquid into different chambers with each thrust and you start to get the idea. Human ingenuity can't come close to nature. Warning: This program contains kangaroo porn and graphic images of echidna masturbation.
Gordon Farrer
PAY TV
WPC 56, BBC First, 8.30pm
WPC 56 is a series that seems to have unnecessary difficulty in settling on a tone. Given that it's the story of the first female police officer in a fictional Midlands town in the 1950s, your own instinct might be "Straight drama leavened by moments of humour, careful not to go too heavy on the nostalgia". And WPC 56 does seem to want to go that route, but it has to struggle against a goofy comedy score so full of walking bass and train-whistle harmonica you think Benny Hill's about to walk on to the set with a knotted hanky on his head. Pity, because Jennie Jacques does an admirable job as WPC Gina Dawson, a young woman who has to contend with 50 shades of sexism at work and another shade at home with her parents. Tonight it's Dawson's first day in uniform, and she's quickly assigned to making tea and sitting in the van while the men get on with the real police work. Of course, it's only a matter of time before she proves herself an altogether better copper than most of the oafs she work with.
Broken Minds, Discovery Science, 9.30pm
If the true-parasite stories of Monsters Inside Me aren't scary enough for you, check out this series in which brain doctors recall some of their most unusual cases. Tonight's include a case of alien hand syndrome.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Turner Classic Movies (pay TV), 8.30pm
Working together for the first time since 1941's The Maltese Falcon, director John Huston and star Humphrey Bogart created one of the most memorable screen portraits of greed, revealing it as the fuel of paranoia and the wellspring of violence. Shot partially on location in Mexico - Huston loved to work anywhere except a Hollywood soundstage - it's the story of three impoverished Americans down on their luck in Mexico - Bogart's Dobbs, Tim Holt as Bob Curtin, and Huston's father, Walter, as the ageing Howard - who risk their lives to pursue a gold prospect only to turn on each other. This is a bitter, arresting movie, told in the escalation of mistrust between the three men that is spurred by the fearful selfishness of Dobbs. As with Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, released two years after this, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre strips away Bogart's knowing cool, revealing a destructive self-loathing.
Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991), SBS One, 12.05am (Sunday)
The perfect accompaniment to Apocalypse Now Redux, which screens earlier in the day at 8.30pm on SBS One, this juicy documentary about the consistently disastrous making of Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam War epic makes clear that the spiritual decay and physical destruction that Coppola sought to capture in his feature came to perfectly define the film's endless production in the Philippines in 1977 and 1978. "We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane," observes Coppola, in footage and recordings made by his wife, Eleanor, at the time and subsequently assembled with filmmakers George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr. Wrestling with disaster and his own ego, Coppola comes across as the tormented artist who crosses the line into madness, at one point insisting that his lead actor, Martin Sheen, who suffered a massive heart attack, couldn't be declared dead unless he said so.
Craig Mathieson
