THE MOORSIDE, BBC1, 9pm
GEMMA Whelan steals the show again as the appalling Karen Matthews.
Her behaviour becomes more bizarre and the viewer will be repelled by this creature who’s always whimpering in self-pity, but then I found myself weeping for her when “the social” remove her children. She cries and you might cry with her.
But then she stops crying and has some Monster Munch, and again we lurch into hatred for her. Who is she? Are her tears genuine? It’s maddening, and that same uncertainty starts to creep into the mind of her biggest supporter, Julie Bushby, tonight. The look on Julie’s face as Karen waves to people in the park, loving the attention, is stern but also deeply hurt and disappointed.
The police close in on Karen when her boyfriend is arrested for child porn possession. Matthews just isn’t bright enough to keep her story straight, and the series ends with painful scenes in court.
ANDREW MARR: MY BRAIN AND ME, BBC2, 9pm
IT was a shock when Andrew Marr suffered a stroke in 2013. He was fit and active and relatively young. Most of us think strokes happen to old or overweight people, but here was a healthy man struck down without warning. It almost killed him.
He explains that, due to the damage he incurred, there is a part of his brain the size of a small tomato "which simply doesn’t exist” and so he has to learn new tricks, little “hints and nudges”, to make it grow again.
And so we see this sharp, intellectual man sitting at a table with his therapist and dropping little plastic bricks into a bowl, just like a toddler at play, but Marr is very humorous and has no time for self-pity. He says he’ll be playing with the bricks and then have to attend to a crisis in the Cabinet. “Talk about multi-tasking!”
He also returns to the hospital where he was treated and meets the team who saved his life.
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