Pick of the week
All That Remains with Niall Breslin
Wednesday, RTÉ One, 9.35pm
The musician, presenter and mental health advocate revisits his native Mullingar to uncover a dark chapter in Ireland’s history of dealing with mental health issues. Near where he grew up in the midlands town stands St Loman’s, a former psychiatric hospital which has been closed since 2013. But when it was founded in 1855, it was known as St Loman’s Lunatic Asylum, and on the grounds of St Loman’s are the unmarked graves of 1,300 people who were committed there, died and were buried and quietly forgotten. Only a numbered metal cross was placed on their graves, a sign of the historic stigma attached to mental illness.
But not all have been forgotten, and some of their descendants have started an online campaign to reinstate the names in the graveyard, and to have a memorial wall built for them.
Breslin hears stories from families of the forgotten, uncovers the burial practices of these institutions, and finds out about other similar burial sites in former “mental hospitals” around the country. It seems that mother and baby homes weren’t the only places where Ireland buried its shameful past.
Highlights
The Capture
Sunday, BBC One, 9pm
Holliday Grainger returns as counter-terrorism chief Rachel Carey in the third series of the cyber thriller, and it looks like real life has caught up with paranoid premise of the show. When it started out in 2019, AI deepfakes were still a distant worry on the horizon, but as the new series begins, it all feels very much in line with the times, and the question “how can we believe what we see?” is all too relevant now.
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The action begins a year after Carey exposed the video manipulation tool known as Correction, and now she’s on a mission to reassure the public that Britain’s surveillance technology can be trusted to correctly identify potential terrorists and stop them before they can carry out atrocities. But the bad guys have access to the type of kit usually only seen in Mission: Impossible, and as the country reels from a sophisticated attack, Carey has to rely on her own instinct to tell truth from lies and friend from foe, and somehow unmask the unknown puppet master behind a sophisticated, high-level conspiracy.
Sort Your Life Out with Stacey Solomon
Tuesday, BBC One, 8pm
Remember your new year’s resolution to clear out all that clutter and get your home properly organised? Still waiting to be done, right? Well, there’s no more excuses because Stacey Solomon is back with the sixth series of Sort Your Life Out, and she and her crack team of tidy-uppers are ready to go into homes around Britain and leave them clean, clutter-free and with oodles more living space created. Their first stop is the home of the Kings, which is stuffed to bursting with 30 years of memories. The family is challenged to let go of half their possessions, but there’s a complication: Gerry has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and Trish is keen to hold on to some of their stuff as they may trigger memories for Gerry.
A Woman of Substance
Wednesday and Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm
Some of us will remember the 1985 telly adaptation of the Barbara Taylor Bradford novel, starring Jenny Seagrove, Deborah Kerr, Barry Bostwick and Liam Neeson. Forty years later, Channel 4 is doing a new adaptation of its original series, this one starring Brenda Blethyn as Emma Harte, the titular woman of substance who has dragged herself out of servitude to become the world’s richest woman – and is hell-bent on using her wealth and status to exact revenge on the family that wronged her years and years ago.
Jessica Reynolds from House of Guinness stars as the younger version of Emma, a working-class girl in Yorkshire who is determined to make a better life for herself. She works as a maid in posh Fairley Hall, and falls in love with young toff Edwin Fairley (Ewan Horrocks), but she is soon betrayed, and her path to riches is smoothed by the dream of taking down the entire Fairley dynasty. The story moves between Yorkshire in the early 1900s and New York in the 1970s, as Emma learns that someone is plotting to snatch the business empire she has built up from scratch.
Ceartas Crua – Mná v An Dlí
Wednesday, TG4, 9.30pm
Historically, the law in Ireland has not served women well, and this new bilingual series charts the battles fought by women down through the years to be treated fairly and equally in Irish law. From the inception of the new State, women have been sidelined by the law, from the marriage ban to the denial of access to contraceptives. The series looks at the moments when women challenged Ireland’s legal system, and profiles the women who took on the patriarchy to win basic rights as citizens.
Part one of this two-part series recounts how a librarian from Leitrim, Vera Casey, successfully challenged the marriage ban which prevented married women from working, and how women laundry workers went on strike in 1945 to win a basic right which we now take for granted: two weeks’ holidays. The programme delves into darker places, including the archaic law which allowed a man to be eligible for compensation if he claimed his wife had sex with another man, and how the shame of having a child out of wedlock led to 183 women standing trial accused of infanticide.
Iron Ladies
Thursday, RTÉ One, 10.15pm
Who were the 35s? At the height of the cold war, a group of Jewish women came together to stage a protest outside the Soviet embassy in London. They were there to support 35-year-old Raiza Palatnik, a Jewish librarian from Odesa who was imprisoned because she sought a visa to leave the USSR so she could practise her Jewish faith without fear of persecution. The women, most of them housewives and mothers, and most of them around the same age as Palatnik, arrived at the embassy dressed in black and demanded Palatnik’s immediate release.
Their protest proved successful, and spawned an international movement, with Jewish women forming their own 35s in Ireland, Canada, Belgium, Italy and Israel to challenge the USSR’s persecution of Soviet Jews. But it didn’t stop at protests outside embassies – many of these women made clandestine forays behind the Iron Curtain, in missions reminiscent of spy novels. In this powerful documentary, award-winning film-maker Aoife Kelleher meets some of the women of the 35s, now in their 70s and 80s, who risked their lives to help their fellow Jewish women escape oppression, and who are finally ready to tell their story.
The Claudia Winkleman Show
Friday, BBC One, 10.40pm
The presenter with the jet-black hair and mascara has become one of the BBC’s most precious assets thanks to the popularity of Strictly Come Dancing and The Traitors, and now Claudia Winkleman has been given her own Friday night chatshow, where she can interview celebrity guests on her very own big couch as they promote their latest project. She’s not replacing Graham Norton, mind – he’ll be back later this spring – but she is delighted her bosses are giving her a chance to show her chatshow chops. “I’m obviously going to be awful, that goes without saying, but I’m over the moon they’re letting me try.”
She’s starting off big for her first show, interviewing Hollywood star Jeff Goldblum, who may or may not talk about his blockbuster roles in the Jurassic Park and Wicked movies, but will definitely wax enthusiastic about his jazz band, The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra. Also guesting is actress Vanessa Williams, star of the hit West End stage version of The Devil Wears Prada, and comedian Jennifer Saunders, whose new film is The Magic Faraway Tree, a fantasy epic based on the book series by Enid Blyton.
Streaming
Scarpetta
From March 11th, Prime Video
Nicole Kidman stars as forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta in this new series adapted from the bestselling crime novels of Patricia Cornwell. It could be an inspired piece of casting, or a complete mismatch à la Tom Cruise as Reacher, but based on Kidman’s form in TV shows such as Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, we’re confident she’ll do justice to one of the most popular characters in modern crime fiction.
The series follows two distinct time lines, one in the 1990s, when Scarpetta is starting out on her career as a chief medical examiner, and one in the present day, where she returns to her hometown to investigate a gruesome murder. I’m guessing the two timelines will connect up in a chilling manner. Jamie Lee Curtis co-stars as Scarpetta’s sister Dorothy, with Bobby Cannavale as detective Pete Marino and Simon Baker from The Mentalist as FBI profiler Benton Wesley.
Age of Attraction
From March 11th, Netflix
For some people, age is just a number, but for others, it’s the number one consideration when choosing a potential partner. Most couples want to be around the same age and on the same page. But what if you found yourself on a date with someone and you had no idea how much older or younger they were than you? Would the age difference matter if the attraction was there?
Netflix has reopened its love lab, following the success of Love Is Blind, only this time it’s looking to see if love is ageless. Only one way to find out: bring a bunch of singletons aged between 22 and 60 to an idyllic villa, and see if the sparks fly across the age gap. No one will have any idea if their date is old enough to be their mom or young enough to be their son. As one participant says: “I don’t know if these guys are my age, my dad’s age, or my grandpa’s age.”
This dating experiment is hosted by Nick Viall and Natalie Joy, who are in an age-gap marriage (he’s 44, she’s 26), and give dating and relationship advice on their own podcast.
