What's on TV: Monday, September 11
Play School: Five Senses
ABC2, 9am
Trouble: Jenny (played by Romola Garai) with son Sam (Jack Rowan) in Born to Kill.
Play School has changed since I used to watch it regularly. Or maybe it's me that's changed? But no, I am essentially the same person I was when I was five, so I'm pretty sure it's the show. The opening sequence is different, for a start: the tastefully basic animation of yore has been replaced by some weird stop-motion extravaganza. I guess that's kids today: so spoilt with modern technology, all they'll accept is stop-motion. Another difference is that now it's got Alex Papps on. You may remember Alex Papps as Frank from Home and Away, but let's be honest, you probably don't. Once you get over the weird opening and the presence of teen heartthrobs, the fundamentals of Play School are still there: simple, jaunty songs and homespun educational methods. It doesn't take much to teach kids about the five senses: a sheet, a torch, a dressing gown, a few pipe-cleaners and a brightly coloured picture book is really all you need. Play School has that heartwarming DIY vibe that makes you think you could put the whole show on in your living room. Which makes you wonder why you're bothering watching it on TV. But then, why work up a sweat making bunny ears out of cardboard when you can just stick your kid in front of Frank from Home and Away? No-brainer. Ben Pobjie
Rodeo Road
NITV, 8pm
Australia has always had a love affair with people who pursue ridiculously inadvisable career paths in search of fame: Charles Kingsford-Smith, Steve Irwin, Jonathan LaPaglia. It's to be hoped that Rodeo Road can make its cast, fellow members of the Danger Addicts club, similarly legendary. These kickarse real-life cowboys muster cattle for a living, but chase glory in the arena on top of angry beasts trying to throw them off. It's quite, quite mad, but gee it makes good TV. Ben Pobjie
movie The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: The Murder at the Red Hill House (2011)
9Gem, 8.40pm
One of the literary events of 2008 was Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: The Murder at Red Hill House, a non-fiction account of the 1860 killing of three-year-old Francis Saville Kent in the village of Rode, Wiltshire (now Somerset). The case was handled by Detective Inspector Jack Whicher, who 12 years earlier was one of the eight founding members of the detective branch at Scotland Yard. Deftly interweaving a gripping whodunit with analysis of the evolution of criminal investigation, Summerscale's book was an international best-seller. She re-invigorated a true-crime genre that had fallen on fallow times. Naturally, television executives came calling and tonight's episode is the first of four tele-features involving Mr Whicher (played by Paddy Considine). But it is the only one based on Summerscale's book or an actual case. (Watch for the surprise Australian connection.) Scott Murray
pay Born to Kill
BBC First, 9.35pm
Every generation has its harvest of bad seeds. The latest seems to be British teenager Sam (Jack Rowan). Though outwardly earnest and ingratiating, he immediately comes off as a dead-set psycho. He practises lies and manipulation in the mirror and he stares all too ominously at a little bird that has stunned itself by flying into a window. And when, early on in this first episode, it looks as though Sam is about to drown a school chum in a swimming pool, it seems clear that series creators Kate Ashfield and Tracey Malone are indeed tipping their hats to The Bad Seed. Viewers labouring under what might be termed "psychopath fatigue" won't bother sticking around. Those who do will find a reasonably intriguing story with a focus split between Rowan and his fearful mother (Romola Garai), who seems to have brought him up on lies about his absent father. Brad Newsome
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