WELCOME TO EDINBURGH, BBC2, Saturday, 7.30pm
YOU might think BBC2 has all the best cultural highlights of Edinburgh but consider the email I got from STV2’s press office this week which promoted their own Festival programming on The Late Show. It told me their guests this evening, live from Edinburgh, would be Alex Salmond “and mind reader, Colin Cloud”. Little wonder the show promises to “send you to bed with a smile on your face”.
It’s certainly a tough act to follow. Can BBC2 possibly compete?
Tonight Kirsty Wark meets the sitar player, Anoushka Shankar, who’s been performing at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. She’s the daughter of the famous Ravi Shankar, but has earned her own place in world music. She discusses her new album and how she composed it in response to the current refugee crisis.
Wark also attends the premiere of Adam and Eve, a play from the National Theatre of Scotland which deals with controversial transgender issues.
INSPECTOR MONTALBANO, BBC4, Saturday, 9pm
THE new series of the Italian detective drama begins tonight.
Its catchy music and the sunny coastal scenery reminded me of Bergerac, and of detective shows from a more innocent age, but any nice memories of old 1980s telly were immediately ruined in the opening scenes.
A glamorous old lady sits at her dressing table, powdering her nose and calling out to her visitor in the hall. She is then horribly battered and strangled. Did such nasty things ever happen in good old Bergerac?
Montalbano soon has his holiday interrupted by a panicked phone call telling him a prostitute has been murdered – which his wife finds “exasperating”.
The murdered woman was married with grandchildren, and the police are decent enough to tell Montalbano she was “a good woman even if she was a prostitute”. Can he crack the case when so much prejudice is stacked against the victim?
THE STATE, C4, Sunday, 9pm
AFTER the terrible events in Barcelona why would anyone want to watch a drama about Daesh? There is enough horror in the news without seeking out a fictionalised form, but good dramas can bring us nuance and understanding which the bluntness of rolling news might miss.
Written and directed by Peter Kosminsky, who gave us the brilliant Wolf Hall, this four-part series follows four British Muslims who leave home for Syria to join the terror group.
When we first see them they are packing quietly in the early morning darkness. They are shaving, yawning, and taking care to lock the front door, and with their wheelie luggage they seem like any other weary holidaymakers, but soon they’re crossing the Turkish border at the dead of night.
We follow them into lawless Syria where the men are trained in battle techniques, and the women encounter the oppressive reality of life under Daesh. Even photos of their mothers must be deleted from their phones – “We don’t have pictures of uncovered women here!”.
FROM RUSSIA TO IRAN: CROSSING THE WILD FRONTIER, C4, Sunday, 8pm
I LOVED this programme. It’s great to see a travel show which doesn’t involve a celebrity chef prancing around Italy or Greece kissing his fingers at fish and olives, or yet another series where a historian tramps around Pompeii. Forget sun and luxury, and forget the well-trodden paths – this is hardcore travel.
This is a new four-part series where the adventurer Levison Wood crosses the sharp Caucasus Mountains which mark the border between Europe and Asia, and where Russia and the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia meet Iran.
In the first episode he is in enigmatic Russia, heading for its southern border where “democracy meets dictatorship” and the land stretches into “republics he can’t even pronounce”. Hovering by helicopter he finds he he can’t land as Putin has a secretive holiday home in the area.
When he’s finally on the ground the Russian police are not happy to see him, and he must journey on into battle-scarred Chechnya.
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