Highlights
Today
Monday-Friday, RTÉ One, 3.30pm
While we spend our afternoons toiling away in our Tara Street sweatshop, churning out TV preview columns for a pittance to feed the ever-hungry media machine, some people are relaxing in their Roche Bobois sofas and watching their favourite afternoon TV shows. This lucky cohort will be rejoicing at the news that Maura Derrane, Dáithí Ó Sé and Sinead Kennedy are back to present a new season of the ever-popular Today show. It’s Ireland’s longest-running afternoon programme, and this 14th series promises more afternoon delights including fashion tips, foodie recipes and fab studio guests, plus new quizzes, competitions and cash giveaways. This season, viewers are being asked to look in their attics to see if there are any priceless heirlooms lying about, and to look inside themselves to find that hidden talent or unlock that dilemma they’ve been grappling with.
Disease X: Hunting the Next Pandemic
Monday, BBC Two, 9pm
Here’s some nice, alarming news to add to your overflowing feed: Covid-19 may be in the rear-view mirror, but apparently there’s another global pandemic waiting just up the road, and this one could be an even bigger car crash than Covid. Even more alarming, scientists have no idea what Disease X looks like or where and when it will raise its ugly head, but most health experts are agreed it could happen again in our lifetime, and could be even deadlier than any outbreak that has happened before. Virologist and broadcaster Dr Chris Van Tulleken is determined to hunt down the pathogen – nicknamed Disease X by the World Health Organisation – that will trigger the next pandemic, and in this documentary he travels around the globe, visiting epidemic hotspots and meeting scientists and medical experts to learn more about how novel viruses emerge, how they spread and how public health policy and vaccinations play their part in tackling new diseases. Sure you might as well start stocking up on toilet paper now, just in case.
Scannal: Money. Mobiles, Moriarty
Tuesday, RTÉ One, 7pm
Remember the Moriarty tribunal? Who could forget - it seemed to go on for aeons (over 14 years, to be exact), becoming part of the wallpaper of Irish political life, and racking up eye-watering costs with each day it ran (€80 million and counting). The tribunal was set up to investigate payments to politicians, with the focus on TD Michael Lowry and former taoiseach Charles Haughey and their links with businessman Ben Dunne, along with Lowry’s connections with billionaire Denis O’Brien. But the Irish public was left with one big, unanswered question: was the tribunal just a huge waste of time and taxpayers’ money? In this two-part series, the Scannal team and presenter Cormac Ó hÉadhra dive back into the morass to find out how it all started and whether it achieved any of its goals.
The Hack
Wednesday, UTV, 9pm
David Tennant, Toby Jones and Robert Carlyle head a heavyweight cast in this drama series telling the story of Britain’s notorious phone hacking scandal which led to the closure of the News of the World and the opening of the Leveson inquiry. Tennant is investigative journalist Nick Davies, who uncovers evidence of widespread phone hacking in the newspaper industry. Among the public figures targeted by tabloid journalists were princes William and Harry, David Beckham, Steve Coogan, Sienna Miller, Charlotte Church and Jude Law. But it wasn’t just rich celebs who were targeted. Unscrupulous journalists had also targeted the parents of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, hacking into their voicemails. Toby Jones plays Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who published Davies’ exposé, and Robert Carlyle plays detective chief superintendent Dave Cook, who, in a parallel storyline, is in charge of a case involving the brutal murder of a private investigator in 1987, which turns out to be connected to the phone-hacking scandal. Dougray Scott plays politician Gordon Brown – doing Brown to a T. The series is written by Jack Thorne, who wrote this year’s big water-cooler drama, Adolescence, and produced by the team who created the highly acclaimed Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
READ MORE
RTÉ Investigates: Forced Fashion
Wednesday, RTÉ One at 9.35pm
We’ve long been warned to avoid the perils of fast fashion – cheap, bad-quality clothing churned out in Asian sweatshops by low-paid workers. But in recent years evidence has emerged of a darker stain on the fashion industry: clothes made from cotton picked and processed through forced labour. In China’s Xinjiang province, minority Uyghurs in detention camps are sent out to the fields and forced to pick and process cotton to make cheap clothing for global exports. Global fashion brands have vowed to cut off all ties with China’s state-sponsored exploitation of ethnic minorities, but are the clothes on our high streets really free of forced labour cotton? In this RTÉ Investigates special, reporter Joe Galvin unravels the clothing supply chains and learns that some Irish retailers have still not fully divested themselves of this dark material.
Shadow Scholars: The Fake Essay Scandal
Wednesday, Channel 4, 10pm
Next time you encounter some insufferable smarty-pants with a degree from a posh British university, don’t waste your time feeling inferior. They might actually be a total thicko who only got through thanks to the work of some shadowy ghostwriter in Kenya. This documentary looks at a scandal sweeping through UK academia, in which students are handing in fake academic papers to earn degrees and move into top careers. The papers are actually written by highly educated scholars in Kenya, who earn their living from helping students in the UK and other countries to game the system. Oxford academic Prof Patricia Kingori travels to Nairobi to meet some of these ghostwriters, and asks the question: if college degrees can be bought, are they worth the paper they’re printed on?
The Graham Norton Show
Friday, BBC One, 10.40pm
Why does every A-lister line up to place their priceless posteriors on Graham Norton’s famous red sofa? Is it the affable Cork man’s easygoing manner and ability to immediately put his guests at ease? Is it his mischievous and slightly racy line of questioning that veers close to the edge without crossing the line of good taste or breaching the stars’ strict PR conditions? Either way, the biggest chatshow on this side of the Atlantic is back for a fab new series, and Graham’s first guests are biggies: The Rock, aka Dwayne Johnson, and Emily Blunt, here to chat about their new sports biopic, The Smashing Machine. Also on the couch is Matthew McConaughey, promoting his new thriller, The Lost Bus; and Aimee Lou Wood, cowriter and star of new romantic comedy/drama series Film Club. British jazz/pop/soul sensation Raye delivers the musical goodies.
Streaming
Slow Horses
Apple TV+ from Wednesday, September 24th
The best spy series on television is back for a fifth series – and if you think that’s good news, Apple TV+ has confirmed that it has already greenlit a sixth and seventh series based on the novels by Mick Herron. Gary Oldman returns as the slovenly, irascible and utterly brilliant Jackson Lamb, who heads the team at Slough House, MI5’s dumping ground for spies who have screwed up. But Lamb is not about to let his slow horses go out to pasture: under his cantankerous guidance the team set out to give the big guns at the intelligence agency’s Regent’s Park HQ a run for their money and outsmart them in the spying game. This series is based on the novel London Rules, which finds Lamb and his team trying to find the connections between a series of bizarre occurrences around the city. As things get more complicated, Lamb and his team must follow London rules – cover your back – if they’re to stay alive.
House of Guinness
Netflix from Thursday, September 25th
Have you ever sat drinking a pint and thought, “You know what, the story of the Guinness family would make a great TV series?” Steven Knight, the Peaky Blinders writer, had that thought – and he has turned the story of one of Ireland’s greatest dynasties into an epic tale of sibling rivalry and ambition as the heirs to the world’s largest brewery battle to keep Guinness as the country’s number-one tipple and grow it into a global brand. It’s like Succession with a creamy head. The eight-part series, set in Dublin and New York in the 19th century, begins with the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness, who has made the brewery a huge success. His four adult children – Arthur, Edward, Anne and Ben – are tasked with taking over the brand, but the siblings are a wild bunch, with a huge lust for life, and you never know what they’re going to do next. The cast includes Anthony Boyle, Louis Partridge, Emily Fairn, Fionn O’Shea, James Norton, Dervla Kirwan, Michael McElhatton, Niamh McCormack, David Wilmot and Jack Gleeson.
Wayward
Netflix from Thursday, September 25th
Welcome to Tall Pines, an idyllic village where the mysterious Evelyn Wade runs an academy for troubled teens. When cop Alex Dempsey moves to the town with his wife, Laura, he encounters two young people – Abbie and Leila – who are trying to escape the school. What’s really going on at Tall Pines Academy, and is Evelyn a caring guardian or a prison-camp commandant? As Alex delves deeper into the secrets of Tall Pines, he finds himself caught in a battle between two generations, and between truth and lies. Toni Collette stars as Evelyn, with Mae Martin, who also created the series, as Alex.
The Savant
Apple TV+ from Friday, September 26th
You need nerves of steel and brains to burn if you’re going to infiltrate online hate groups and prevent them from carrying out atrocities. Enter the Savant, an undercover investigator with a talent for getting close to the United States’ most dangerous extremists and uncovering their plans to disrupt civil society and undermine democracy. Jessica Chastain stars in a tense eight-part thriller based on the real-life story of a woman, known as the Savant, who was the subject of a magazine article headlined “Is it possible to stop a mass shooting before it happens?”
