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House Rules, Seven, 7.30pm
After their superfluous request that their home be ‘‘styled like a display house’’ (all the projects on this show end up looking like display houses), NSW father-and-daughter team Steve and Tiana are worried that their nest full of family memories might end up looking bland. But then, Tiana is always worried about things that have yet to happen. In this episode, she’s also in a flap about ‘‘king of bling’’ Brian turning their master bedroom into a disco. Hopefully, it will at least be a display disco. As this generally jovial competition rolls on, it is up to the contestants to provide the dramatic content to offset the excruciatingly dull tasks of home renovation. So far, they’re doing all right in that department.
Love Child, Nine, 8.40pm
As the second season of Nine’s hit retro-drama unfolds, the women of the fictional Kings Cross Hospital and Stanton House in Sydney in 1969 continue their heartbreaking work helping expectant unwed mothers trapped in the forced-adoption system. With such a bleak premise, the treatment might have been overwhelmingly sombre. But while the horror stories at the heart of the series play out with shattering intensity (as is the case in this episode, when Harriet Dyer’s fallen Toorak socialite Patricia Saunders faces a particularly distressing delivery), there is plenty of psychedelic colour in the soapy subplots to make the sadness easier to take. Sometimes, the plotlines seem unrealistic, such as when progressive midwife Joan Millar (Jessica Marais) searches for the single father of a baby whose mother died in childbirth. Stellar performances make Love Child eminently watchable.
NCIS: LA, Ten, 9.30pm
Perceptive fans of this slick US procedural will notice that all might not be as it appears when Russian mobster-turned-NCIS informer Arcady Kolcheck (Vyto Ruginis) is blown up on a rooftop car park. It’s a routinely dramatic start to a complex episode revolving around illicit international trade, and the apparently hopeless quest of G. Callan (Chris O’Donnell) to discover his true identity. Callan couldn’t ask for a more supportive work partner than Sam Hanna (LL Cool J). Cute comic relief and corny workplace banter don’t harm the main story, which hurtles along against its glamorous city backdrop.
Bridget McManus
PAY TV
Building Wild, National Geographic, 8.30pm
Arty carpenter Paulie DiMeo and rough-hewn excavation contractor Tuffy Bakaitis specialise in building innovative holiday cabins in nearly inaccessible locations. Tonight’s project is par for the course – a family getaway at the end of a steep, slippery dirt track high in the mountains of upstate New York. Making things even more tricky is the fact the cabin will have to straddle a ravine with a running stream. The results are as impressive as usual.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Sexy Beast (2000), Thriller Movies (pay TV), 4.50pm
A fixture in the London underworld, the mere mention of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) is enough to terrify the happily retired London crooks and their wives who he’s come to unexpectedly visit in their luxurious Spanish villas. Compared with Don, Gary Dove (Ray Winstone) is a genial figure; all his vitality and drive have evaporated under the scorching Mediterranean sun. There’s a heavy, hallucinatory tone to Jonathan Glazer’s first feature, one of several marked departures from the previous schools of British crime films. Sexy Beast has neither the barbed machinations of a Long Good Friday (although Don and Gary could be graduates of the era) or the mockney wit of a Guy Ritchie film. With fierce but vacant eyes and an unwillingness to allow the merest refusal, Don literally stalks Gary around his house, an unwelcome guest who has arrived to recruit the former safecracker for a job masterminded by crime boss Teddy Bass (Ian McShane), who is involved in a spot of one-upmanship with an aristocratic banker (James Fox) he met at an orgy. Glazer captures Don and Gary in claustrophobic compositions, with Pinter-like dialogue that chases around Don’s refusal to accept that Gary has retired. ‘‘I am going to have to turn this opportunity down,’’ says a fearful Gary, his tanned body suddenly tense and shivering. ‘‘No, you are going to have to turn this opportunity yes!’’ barks Don, so furious he’s unwilling to recognise basic rules of sentence structure.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)Go!, 8.30pm
English screenwriter (The Terminal) turned filmmaker (Hitchcock) Sacha Gervasi once recounted to me his involvement in constructing Michael Bay’s second opus about giant fighting robots that come to Earth and, not surprisingly, fight a great deal. Gervasi and a bunch of other writers were in a room at a Santa Monica hotel, trying to nut out a plot when they hit an impasse. Bay, the impresario of whip pans and explosions, was summoned and asked for his input. He told the writers not to worry as no one would notice if the story didn’t really make sense. Bay opted, as always, for sensation over story, and that’s reflected in a sequel that has a manic energy exemplified by the harried Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), the Californian teenager who befriended the good Autobots in their interstellar battle against the evil Decepticons. Overt American military power is worshipped, offset by striking imagery of Decepticons atop Egypt’s ancient pyramids.
Craig Mathieson