pay Fast N' Loud: Demolition Theatre
Friday, Discovery Turbo, 6.30pm
Richard and Christie from Fast N' Loud and the two chuckleheads from Street Outlaws have pulled up on a long couch to chortle at viral internet videos. Unfortunately, none of them has anything terribly witty or interesting to say – but if you can think of a cheaper way to make TV the folks at Discovery will be all ears. The clips are mostly vehicle-related – there's dash-cam footage of car crashes, helmet-cam footage of motorcycle crashes, bystander footage of bicycle-stunt mishaps and so on. A clip in which some dufus microwaves a glow stick and freaks out when it explodes in his face is followed by a fairly pointless interview with the dufus himself. The most memorable clip is of that of Mildura radio presenter Amber Wheatland shrieking in terror while being repeatedly swooped by a magpie, but you might as well just check that out on YouTube.
Brad Newsome
Mr Selfridge
7Two, 7.30pm
The fourth – and final – season of this period drama opens nine years (years!) after the last season ended, and Harry Selfridge (Jeremy Piven) is still a man about town, a proper celebrity and an inveterate gambler, with a string of ladies on his arm. While we're left to largely guess what happened to him after Nancy's (Kelly Adams) lies were revealed (or indeed to Nancy), we are brought up to speed with the rest of the cast: Harry's daughter Rosalie (Kara Tointon) now has a nine-year-old daughter herself, George (Calum Callaghan) and Connie (Sacha Parkinson) are married and Kitty (Amy Beth Hayes) and Frank (Samuel West) have bought themselves a big new house; how is yet to be revealed. And Lady Mae (Katherine Kelly) is back, much to Harry's delight, looking to sell her Selfridge shares as whatever it is she was doing in Paris hasn't worked out. Naturally, Harry promptly gives her a flat to live in (before taking her for a night on the town). Fans should expect a rocky road this season (and some wild deviations from history) as Harry's world is set to come crashing down; when the finale aired in the UK earlier this year, many were left weeping.
Kylie Northover
movie The Wolfman (2010)
7flix, 11.05pm
Joe Johnston's horror remake miscast Benicio Del Toro as Laurence Talbot, the exiled American son of Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins) who in 1891 returns to the family seat on the English moors, where his brother has been savagely murdered. Laurence is nominally a Shakespearian actor, but the onset of lycanthropy soon turns him into a beast that pursues even his late sibling's fiance Gwen (Emily Blunt). For a film nominally about the struggle to retain self-control, it is remarkably indulgent: every scene is over dressed with creeping moss and waves of fog (even the interiors), while each arrival of the bloodthirsty title creature brings geysers of blood as limbs are severed and chests eviscerated. The dialogue is often boilerplate Gothic: "God has forsaken him"; "He can only be released by someone who loves him"; "God help us all". Francis Ford Coppola's take on Dracula achieved so much more.
Craig Mathieson
movie Pierrot le Fou (1965)
stan.com.au (Pay TV)
In Jean-Luc Godard's mischievous yet maudlin 1965 movie, Parisian swells talk in advertising slogans and comically worship their consumer credits. It's enough to make the disaffected Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo and his beguiling boxer's nose) skip out on his family when he runs into a former acquaintance of uncertain provenance, Marianne (Anna Karina). Political realities repeatedly intrude but scrapes are sorted with moves Marianne cops from old Laurel and Hardy flicks, as Godard choreographs both their movements and the stories they tell each other. The early scenes embrace artificiality, especially when Godard eschews rear projection for rotating lights in a driving scene, and Ferdinand's belief that they can "escape from a dream" looks forlorn as Hollywood genres get reinterpreted by Godard and his great cinematographer Raoul Coutard. The couple's playful union, however, slowly comes unstuck, ending with betrayal and stark retribution that possibly reflected on Karina's marriage to Godard.
Craig Mathieson