FREE TO AIR
Home and Away, Seven, 7pm
While Neighbours hands out guest spots to visiting celebrities as easily as Izzy gave herself to Dr Karl, Home and Away has been more circumspect. Except for tonight, when the Summer Bay soapie that exercises its quality control by employing Johnny Ruffo gets its cherry popped by British singer Ed Sheeran. Who? That ginger bloke who is best friends with Taylor Swift and starred in a video recently with a giant puppet of himself? Yeah, that one. As cameos go, it’s not a bad one – Sheeran pops up to visit his old nanny Marilyn (Emily Symons), who, being a tarot card or two short of a full deck, doesn’t realise “Teddy” is an international superstar. He signs autographs and sings a song to help heal the town (from what it’s not made clear although “the troubles” are mentioned, which puts Alf ‘‘IRA’’ Stewart in a whole new light), you know, the usual.
Rachel Khoo’s Kitchen Notebook, Melbourne, SBS, 8pm
The gorgeous Rachel Khoo wraps up her cooking show with a trip to the Yarra Valley. There’s not a milkshake in a jam jar, just great local produce – a mushroom farm! a golden trout farm! a fruit farm! – cooked and slathered in butter, creme fraiche and cheese. Lots of cheese. That’s the best thing about Khoo, unlike the Paleo Petes of this world, she’s not afraid of the good stuff. Her snapshot of Melbourne has been a delight and it has been wonderful to see our food culture reflected in a such a positive way. Now, if only someone could tell me how she keeps that lipstick in place while eating that nectarine tart...
Bespoke, ABC, 10pm
Marcus Westbury is a doer. He helped revive Newcastle’s city centre from a ghost town of empty shops into a creative hub full of craftspeople, artists and cafes. He has now turned his attention to exploring why those “makers” have made such a comeback and why there has been an explosion of small-scale businesses in Australia over the last decade. It’s not just nanna jams from the market, either, it’s everything from the all-conquering online marketplace Etsy to the ubiquitousness of hand-made jewellery and craft breweries. As a host, Westbury is affable, engaging and – importantly – beard-free (although his black-rimmed spectacles do put him on the low-to-medium hipster scale).
Louise Rugendyke
PAY TV
Eat Well for Less, LifeStyle You, 8.30pm
MasterChef costermonger Gregg Wallace and fellow grocer Chris Bavin are out to help British families save money – and, boy, do they succeed tonight. They’re off to Lancashire, where Howard, Jenny and their two young sons are spending far too much at the supermarket. Howard is an incorrigible impulse buyer and Jenny buys loads of whatever’s on special, whether she needs it or not. A quick audit finds more than $2000 of groceries sitting unused in the cupboards and fridge. Howard and Jenny find some basic meal planning and blind taste-testing of cheaper products is saving them plenty of cash. But it’s not all boring discipline. Wallace and Bavin encourage them to spend some savings on better quality food – such as nice, meaty butcher’s sausages instead of disgusting, super-cheap ones. Informative and inspiring.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Edward, My Son (1949) TCM (pay TV), 6.40pm
Little-seen drama from director George Cukor about a father (Spencer Tracy) who goes to extraordinary lengths to save his son’s life. This is an important, if not always convincing, film about how an obsessive drive for success and a perfect world can become a cancer within.
Sixteen Candles (1984) Eleven, 9pm
Of all the great directors who have passed away, the ones I miss most, the ones whom I cannot think about without a warming smile, are Orson Welles and John Hughes. The great Europeans may have left an artistic legacy unmatched by the New Worlders, but in person they were often severe and unyielding, unlikely to be anyone’s first choice of a fun lunch companion. Of course, Welles had no equal in the charming and erudite fellow-diner stakes, whereas Hughes, whom people seem not to have known that well, chose instead to just leave us the gift of the best teens movies ever made. Most important of all, though, and it tends to be forgotten, the young have never had a more passionate, fearless and eloquent defender of their rights and rites of passage. If Hughes were still with us, the controlling antics of the politically correct would still have their finest critic blasting away at their ersatz humanism. Hughes recognised cant when he saw it.
So, to Sixteen Candles, where Hughes’ directorial career began. It has the director’s classic opening gambit: a family awakes one morning so concerned with personal issues that they all overlook something far more important. In Sixteen Candles, an upcoming wedding has distracted them from remembering to say happy birthday to Sam (Molly Ringwald).At school, Sam’s day gets even worse, Hughes satirising what he sees as the dubious aspects of formalised (penitentiary-ised?) education. Back home, wildly eccentric relatives arrive, one grandmother remarking in front of Sam: ‘‘Fred, she’s got her boobies!’’ This is one of a hundred startling (plus many unprintable) one-liners. Agonisingly funny, sweet and tender, this is the first of the masterworks where Hughes imagined a universe where the young are valued, and the negating (and worse) influences of parents and teachers held to a minimum. He celebrated independence of spirit and thought, and saw in disobedience a life force spiritedly trying to find its way. He satirised the family unit, but that is where his true heart lay. He made stars out of many and he wrote dialogue so funny one can often miss how painfully accurate it is. Hughes was a colossus and I sure wish he was still around.
Scott Murray