David Attenborough: Birds of Paradise, Ten, 7.30pm

Any woman watching David Attenborough’s birds of paradise might feel bone-crushingly envious seeing the female of the species going about her business clad in sensible drab brown – the ornithological equivalent of tracksuit pants – while the males,  in plumage that makes Liberace look like a  wallflower, are forced to devise ridiculous dances to attract a mate. These scenes, reminiscent of a King Street nightclub on a Saturday night, are just one reason to watch the eminently watchable Attenborough.  Birds of Paradise, which puts the microscope on the eccentric bird fauna of New Guinea, is an excursion into one of Attenborough’s lifelong passions as well as a pithy mixture of natural and human history.

Brooklyn Nine Nine, SBS2, 8pm

Andy Samberg’s performance as Jake Peralta owes a massive debt  to Steve Guttenberg in Police Academy, and it is in the anarchic spirit of that movie franchise that the precinct goes into lockdown during an anthrax scare.

Stop Laughing ... This is Serious, ABC, 9pm

Telling the history of Australian comedy in three parts is no mean feat, which is why Stop Laughing feels like a runaway truck careening down a hill. A conveyor belt of comics  give their take on the joke industry that kicked off sometime around Dad and Dave and wound up at Housos; from royalty (Barry Humphries)  to  newcomers such as Nazeem Hussain and Indigenous comics Kevin Kropinyeri and Sean Choolburra.  Eric Bana is forced to narrate some of the dreariest lines since year seven social studies (‘‘Being able to laugh at ourselves is quintessentially Australian’’), but aside from the clumsy exposition the first instalment suffers from attempting too much. It covers  the shift from the Aussie ocker male to the multicultural present (the females get a  token brief run), but class is the elephant in the room. It’s more than a little irksome to see Steve Vizard extolling the virtues of ‘‘the greatness in ordinariness’’ in The Castle, and Stop Laughing is  too rushed to tackle such controversies as Housos’ Paul Fenech, who  defends his  comedy as polemical truth – or is he simply, as John Safran suggests, a douchebag outsider?

Larissa Dubecki

PAY TV

The Newburgh Sting, Wednesday, Showtime, 8.30pm

A sober but disturbing documentary looking at the case of the ‘‘Newburgh Four’’, who in 2010 were jailed on terrorism charges arising from a year-long FBI sting. They were clearly bad men, but the operation raises much wider questions about the conduct of the FBI and other arms of the US government. A lawyer for one of the men describes the operation as a clear-cut case of entrapment because the four had neither the prior intent nor the resources to carry out a bomb plot of the kind that the FBI badgered them into.Then there are questions about why the FBI chose to have the operation run by an informant who was a pathological liar with a history of fraud; the FBI’s evident tailoring of the plot scenario for publicity purposes; and the counterproductivity of devoting resources to manufacturing a crime that could never have happened when there were real terrorists at work elsewhere.

Brad Newsome

MOVIES

Inception (2010), Go, 8.30pm

The British-born, American-raised filmmaker who is the Stanley Kubrick to a current generation of young men who can’t articulate their unease, Christopher Nolan is best known for reinventing Batman for a post-9-11 age, but it is the movies he made in between his excursions to Gotham City that have been the most intriguing. 2006’s The Prestige remains his keenest work, revealing the death wish that is intrinsically tied to a life of public performance, but with Inception Nolan remade the heist thriller for the online age, setting the crimes within the subconscious of the victims targeted by a guilt-laden criminal mastermind named Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). By operating within the territory that nourishes so much of the cinema, Nolan can reconcile visual wonders and personal regret; the more Cobb achieves the greater his personal failings. The extended third act finale, balancing dream within dream, could have lost a level (the structure of video gaming informs the movie’s aesthetic), but nonetheless this is 007 by way of Freud. The director also makes good use of DiCaprio’s dedication to being a leading man – no matter the character – by pairing him up with Ellen Page as a young protege, Ariadne, and, crucially, Marion Cotillard, as his wife, Mal, who lurks within Cobb’s dreams like a vengeful spirit. Male protagonists with a lost wife or partner are a recurring element in Nolan’s work, but embodied with a gaze forged across time without end by Cotillard, Mal is not a plot point from the past but the recurring dream that threatens to become a nightmare.

Fading Gigolo (2013), Premiere Movies (pay TV), 8.30pm

A consummate character actor, whether for the Coen brothers or Michael Bay, John Turturro’s filmmaking career, beginning with the battling Italian-American brothers of Mac in 1992, has been intermittent but mainly rewarding. Fading Gigolo, however, is a vainglorious misfire, a comic drama about a humble, self-contained bookstore clerk named Fioravante (Turturro) who finds work as a masterful gigolo employed by the likes of a wealthy dermatologist (Sharon Stone) and her best friend (Sofia Vergara). His accidental pimp is his bookstore boss, Murray, who is played by Woody Allen with a predictable shtick that Turturro respectfully allows to unfold without impediment, and the film, which also involves Fioravante’s friendship with an Orthodox Jewish widow (Vanessa Paradis), manages to be both minor and unfulfilling. It’s neither funny nor insightful, and comes to resemble an independent version of the Hollywood vanities favoured by Robert Redford or Warren Beatty as age caught up with matinee idol looks.
Craig Mathieson