JAPAN’S NORTHERN WILDERNESS, BBC2, 7.30pm ADENTURER
Steve Backshall is joined by his wife, the double Olympic gold medal- winning rower Helen Glover, to explore the lesser known wilderness of Northern Japan. In this two-part series they will travel through an area full of exotic wildlife, rumbling volcanoes and ancient shrines.
It’s fascinating stuff, even if the comments verge on the tiresomely predictable: it’s a “landscape of extreme contrasts” apparently, and is also “like a postcard” and “so pretty”.
Hearing these empty exclamations, I sometimes wish we could have more “slow TV” where the camera would just ponderously make its way through jungle, along railways lines, and across dusty roads, letting us soak up the sounds and atmosphere without this constant chattering.
But, as with the series on Mexico being screened tomorrow, it’s good to see another side of a country.
We often think of Japan as a crowded, neon-soaked metropolis but here we see fantastic emptiness and spirituality – if you can tune out the chirpy voices.
TRUMP ON CULTURE: BRAVE NEW WORLD?, BBC2, 8.20pm
DURING Donald Trump’s first few months in office all the attention has been, quite naturally, on his impact on domestic politics and foreign affairs. Building walls and destroying Obamacare, trying to insult Angela Merkel and chum up with Vladimir Putin, starting wars or not starting wars...
It’s quite right that these issues have grabbed the headlines, but this one-off programme asks what effect the unsettling President might be having on America’s cultural landscape.
The art critic Alastair Sooke meets figures from American literature, film and TV to ask their opinions on Trump, and find out what impact his plans to cut federal funding for the arts might have on their work. Strangely, not all of the contributors are opposed to Trump.He meets the novelists Lionel Shriver, Paul Auster and Howard Jacobson, and also some journalists who have particular reason to be aggrieved, given Trump’s fierce insistence that they’re all “FAKE NEWS!”
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BABS, BBC1, 8pm
I THOUGHT a biopic of Barbara Windsor would be saucy, but this was surprisingly sad. It’s 1992 and Windsor is at a low point in her career. She wanders out on to an empty stage and starts talking to ghosts.
As in A Christmas Carol, figures from her past appear and she reflects on her life. Her bickering mum and dad argue in the stalls and we’re taken back to Babs’ childhood as a Second World War evacuee and then as a bubbly girl at stage school. Getting older, we see her in a mini skirt and with a mad beehive hairdo in swinging London as her career takes off and she falls in love with a gangster.
The older Barbara, played throughout by Samantha Spiro, is watching her younger self and commentating on her life, and the real Barbara Windsor does a few cameos.
It’s melancholy, like surveying your life in a flash before death, but there’s still room for cheeky humour though, with the young Windsor being warned: “If you’re not careful you’ll end up playing a sexy little blonde for the rest of your life.”
MEXICO: EARTH’S FESTIVAL OF LIFE, BBC2, 8pm
ANYONE who is currently watching Better Call Saul might want to dip in to this series where they will be reminded that Mexico, which looms large in the Netflix series, isn’t all about violent men and drug cartels.
We’re also reminded of Mexico’s size. It’s easy to think of it as a stub of land below its vast northern neighbour, but it’s a huge country, sharing a border of nearly 2000 miles with the US. To put that in perspective, the British mainland is 600 miles long. This three-part series journeys along the famous Sierra Madre mountain chain to show us the amazing variety of wildlife.
They have everything there from black bears to millions of delicate butterflies – the latter representing the souls of the dead to many Mexicans. Up in these mountains lives the blue agave plant from which we get tequila, and there are also remains of past civilisations, such as the ruins of an ancient Aztec shrine.
The variety, richness and colour there is almost dizzying.
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