MAN DOWN, C4, 10pm
THAT dreadful series of Top Gear was good for one thing at least: it featured the gigantic Greg Davies one week as the Star In A Reasonably Priced And Frankly Humiliating Cheap Copy Of Clarkson’s Ideas. I jumped for joy at Davies’s appearance as this surely meant his brilliant sitcom, Man Down, was coming back.
I love the show. Even my dog loves it.
Davies plays Dan, a pathetic, lovelorn, middle-aged man who hates his job and lives with his mum, “Old Woman” who, this week, brings a new boyfriend home – a brash Yorkshireman played by Tony Robinson who takes a furious dislike to Dan.
Things are tough at school when Dan is summoned to a disciplinary hearing. He must try and destroy his HR file but a new janitor, a mentally unstable Serbian played by Steven Berkoff, stands in the way.
SHADES OF BLUE, SKY LIVING, 9pm
JENNIFER Lopez stars in this new drama about a tough Noo Yoik cop.
It opens as she sits on her bed, tearful and terrified, making a confession into a webcam on her laptop: “I always wanted to be a good cop,” she weeps. “I always told myself that the end would justify the means. But now that I’m at the end I can’t justify anything.”
We flash back to a fortnight previously where she and her rookie colleague, Loman, go on a drugs bust. They crash into a flat and, in panic, shoot a suspect who had posed no threat. He’d just been quietly playing his X-Box.
Harlee Santos (Lopez) fires shots to make it look like the cops were under attack, and urges her nervous colleague to trust her: “the truth is in the paperwork”.
Soon her boss, played by Ray Liotta, is on the scene and warns her that Internal Affairs will need to conduct an investigation and Harlee’s spur of the moment decision soon begins to spread havoc in her life.
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