Brumbies player David Pocock is the subject of tonight's Australian Story on ABC. Photo: Jamila Toderas
Free to air
Australian Story
ABC, 8pm
Champion sportspeople are rarely all that interesting off the field: their "personal" story is usually that they train hard and eat sensibly and listen to their coach. Occasionally one pops up with a more compelling narrative: Andre Agassi, say, and his appalling overbearing father. Happily, rugby union star David Pocock falls into the latter category, both for the unusual childhood that clearly shaped his career, and for the strong principles that guide his life off-field today, which have included refusing to get married until Australia legalises same-sex weddings. This Australian Story tags along with Pocock on one of his regular visits to the country of his birth, Zimbabwe, where we learn he had an idyllic upbringing playing rugby and enjoying the success of his family’s citrus plantation ... until Robert Mugabe nationalised the farms and Pocock’s parents fled to Brisbane. Young David turned to sport as a coping mechanism – but his success came at a cost.
Unreal
SBS2, 8.30pm
The door of the limo opens and out steps a beauty into the arms of a charming bachelor, ‘‘Adam Cromwell, heir to the Cromwell fortune’’. They embrace (on cue) ... but a little too enthusiastically, truth be told. She’s grabbing his behind and sticking her tongue down his throat. ‘‘Cut!’’ yells the executive producer. ‘‘She’s supposed to be marriage material – not his Mexican hooker!’’ It’s not hard to imagine this is really what it’s like on the set of a show like The Bachelor, where sneaky camera angles, clever edits, staged clashes and free-flowing alcohol combine in the quest for good television. Unreal, premiering on SBS tonight after a run online, chronicles the shooting of a fictional reality/dating show called Everlasting. Billed as a ‘‘dramedy’’, there are few straight-out laughs; it’s a dark satire that imagines the worst of reality TV and how it poisons the relationships of all those involved. Angus Holland
Downton Abbey
Seven, 9pm
Like not judging a book by its cover, seasoned Downton fans know the perils of judging a new season of the drama by its opening episodes. And so it is as we return to the stately mansion in episode 2 of the final season. Keep your eye on Mary and Edith, both of whom are being carefully positioned for later developments. Paul Kalina
Pay TV
Luther
BBC First, 8.30pm
Luther is a bit silly, of course, but heck, you could drop Idris Elba into something as camp as ’Allo ’Allo and he would turn it into serious drama. You could give him Rene Artois’ immortal line about his place of birth – ‘‘Yes, we are both Nancy boys’’ – and he would make it sound like a threat to strangle you in your sleep. In this new two-parter, we find Elba’s DCI John Luther having taken leave from the coppering caper, so he can sit and brood in a little cottage on the edge of a crumbling cliff, but he’s about to get dragged back to London. For one thing, there’s another serial killer on the loose. For another, Luther’s serial-killer girlfriend seems to have got herself killed. Both cases are going to require Luther’s glowering, crash-through-or-crash approach, so he gets himself a new partner (Game of Thrones’ Rose Leslie) and gets busy. Brad Newsome
Movies
Selma (2014)
Masterpiece Movies (pay TV), 8.30pm
History unfolds with bloody retribution and harsh personal realities in Ava DuVernay’s remarkable drama, where the depiction of America’s civil rights movement is so charged and powerful that the usual stately recreation of the past has no chance to take hold. It’s a film of arresting words and damning images, as the Rev Dr Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) brings the struggle for equality to the Alabama city where in 1965 the state’s response would horrify the world. DuVernay positions her subject as a man whose quest for justice demands greatness but allows for personal failings, and one of the movie’s great strengths is the full-bodied portrayal of his wife, Coretta King (Carmen Ejogo), who serves as a political instrument, a personal bedrock, and a private conscience to her husband. The most violent scenes here are not the police brutalising peaceful protestors, but the private confrontation of a marriage being torn asunder. Few works have better captured the demand, and the cost, of rightful change.
The Departed (2006)
Go, 9.30pm
With Goodfellas Martin Scorsese made clear that the Mafioso life produced psychosis on an institutional scale; but pitching up in Boston with a story remade from a Hong Kong thriller, The Departed settles for the workmanlike notion that the deception of an undercover existence eventually cracks open the operative. The psychological fulcrum for the two adversaries – Matt Damon’s Colin Sullivan, the working class kid infiltrating the state police, and his mirror, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan, the police rookie who fakes his dismissal and goes back to the streets – is Vera Farmiga’s Madolyn, a psychiatrist who conveniently becomes involved with these two sides of the same coin even as they’re escalating their attempts to identify each other. The characters are fuelled by violence – “What’s wrong with this country. Everybody hates everybody,” notes an Indian deli owner after an Irish-Italian brawl trashes his business – and the picture is equally driven by stars. Physically and mentally, DiCaprio and Damon are finely contrasted leads – the former is rangy and emotive, the latter stocky and insular. But the central performance belongs to Jack Nicholson, as the malevolent local crime boss Frank Costello, who spews out menace and madness. It’s his over the top take on Robert De Niro as Al Capone in The Untouchables and watching him dispense murder and bon mots with equal pleasure you’re reminded how subtly good Meryl Streep is by comparison in The Devil Wears Prada. Craig Mathieson
