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The Punk Syndrome, SBS2, 9.30pm
Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: manager discovers raw musician, thinks he can mould him into a saleable talent, recruits three others and, et voila, a band is formed. Only this isn’t the latest Simon Cowell confection we’re talking about, but Finnish punk band Pertti Kurikka’s Name Day. Pertti is the guitarist, writer of the music, and the bloke spotted by manager Kalle Pajamaa as a potential star. He is also 59 and a man with both a short fuse and a significant developmental disability (cerebral palsy, if the lyrics screamed by frontman Kari Aalto are to be believed). In fact, all the band’s members are living with disabilities, and this documentary traces a year in their lives as the band grows from novel therapy project to popular festival act. There are moments when you wonder if the filmmakers aren’t on the wrong side of a cruel joke, but the band has gone on since the film was released in 2012 to represent Finland at Eurovision this year.
Ink Master, 7Mate, 8.30pm
In what kind of world are real people referred to as “human canvasses”? In what kind of world do real people willingly submit to become same? In the world of professional-tattooing-under-pressure-in-front-of-a-camera, that’s where. Ink Master is MasterChef for people with earlobe furniture and mohawks. There are pressure tests, voting, a panel of judges, cutaway comments explaining such challenging concepts as proportion (“Making sure that the sizes of all aspects of the tattoo match up”, Melissa explains, though everyone else goes with “It’s making sure it doesn’t look like crap”).
Catastrophe, ABC, 9.35pm
Sharon (Sharon Horgan) and Rob (Rob Delaney) are pondering what sort of a wedding to have if they are to legitimise their rushed, unromantic and rather touching union before the baby comes. Sharon wants “something more than a sad transaction in a grey building”, but Rob’s last experience of a big wedding ended with him pooping his pants in front of 300 people. Sharon thinks Rob’s mother Mia (Carrie Fisher) needs to come; Mia can’t imagine why. As it nears the end of its short and perfectly formed run, this charming rom-com remains as real as it is funny. It won’t be a catastrophe when it finishes, perhaps, but I’ll be gutted all the same.
Karl Quinn
PAY TV
Nashville, Thursday, Soho, 8.30pm
Nashville is like one of those domino-toppling world-record attempts, but in dramatic form. It’s so perfectly constructed that just one little flick can send a cascade ofdrama spiralling off in multiple directions. Tonight, for instance, the fact that Sadie shot her abusive ex has country-music queen Rayna (Connie Britton) hurrying to the cop shop just in time to discover her own ex-fiance, Luke (Will Chase), was with Sadie at the time. Sadie’s drama causes Rayna to cancel her appearance at Juliette’s baby shower, causing Juliette (Hayden Panettiere) to have a tantrum that sends her into labour, causing Avery (Jonathan Jackson) to jump off the tour bus and race back to Nashville, leaving Gunnar (Sam Palladio) and Scarlett (Australian Clare Bowen) together to maybe rekindle their old romance. Phew! And all this without even mentioning poor old Deacon (Charles Esten) and his new cancer. It’s all wonderfully written and perfectly cast, withterrific original songs. And the sight of Panettiere doing a little blonde Godzilla allover the carefully decorated nursery is just hilarious.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) Eleven, 9pm
When maestro John Hughes wrote and produced Pretty in Pink, he intended that the pretty, working-class Andie (Molly Ringwald) should end up with the geek (Jon Cryer). But the on-screen chemistry between Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy, playing a rich boy, was so palpable that audiences rebelled at test screenings and Hughes had to abandon his original ending and get director Howard Deutch to film another, this time with Andie and McCarthy’s Blane in each other’s arms. Perhaps out of frustration at being usurped, Hughes wrote a new film, Some Kind of Wonderful, which reworks and gender-inverts Pretty in Pink’s love-triangle, but keeps the original ending. Again he hired Howard Deutch as director. After Ringwald turned down the lead role, the cast became Eric Stolz (playing the pretty working-class boy), Lea Thompson (the rich girl) and Mary Stuart Masterson (the tomboy, replacing the geek). ABrat Pack hit, it is another notable entry in the Hughes canon, even if questions remain about Hughes’ ‘‘I’m Using My Ending No Matter What Anyone Thinks’’. For, yet again, the audience wanted the American Dream fairytale, while Hughes’ standing up for those on the fringes of society occasionally feels forced rather than organic (unlike in his best work). One doesn’t return to Pretty and Wonderful as often as to the Hughes’ classics, which is perhaps why the partnership ended. It’s not that Deutch films don’t quite zing and thrill, it is just they don’t have the same gravitas.
The Searchers and Red River(1956), (1948)Fox Classics (pay TV), 8.35pm and 10.35pm
Howard Hawks’ Red River ostensibly concerns a cattle drive from Texas to Missouri, but is more importantly a journey into the ruthless heart of the pioneering west. We know from the moment Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) discovers young Matthew Garth lost and half mad in the wilderness, the sole survivor of an Indian attack, that one day the two of them will seriously cross paths. And 14 years later it does, when Matthew (Montgomery Clift) abandons Dunson to his fate. Their final showdown is why movies need to exist and why Hawks is the great American poet on the love between men. John Ford’s The Searchers, clearly inspired by Red River, features loner Ethan Edwards (Wayne) in search of a girl kidnapped by Indians, accompanied by the younger Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), who has not yet been scarred by life’s challenges and sees renewal where Ethan sees only death. For many, this is the greatest western ever told ... or is it Red River?
Scott Murray