FREE TO AIR
T20 Big Bash, Channel Ten, 7pm
The 2012 version of Dredd features a permanently visored Karl Urban as an unyielding lawmaker.
OK, I was wrong when I wrote this time last year that T20 cricket wouldn't find an audience. Turns out Cuppa Soup Cricket was just what the punters wanted, them so busy they need their willow and leather delivered in doses as easy to insert into their lives as a lubricated suppository. They came flocking to this nonsensical abasement of a fine game like seagulls to a busted bucket of chips. Unlike other fast-food type pastimes, this one does not leave me wanting more. I just don't get it. Tonight: some blokes in orange come up against some blokes in pink to play slog-ball between bouts of go-go dancing and fireworks. Whatever.
Commando School, SBS One, 8.30pm
It's part of the job description, but for some of the young men trying to break in to the Royal Marines Commandos unit the penny is only just starting to drop. Says one: "The idea of throwing a grenade into a house, then going in and bayoneting someone is starting to bother some of the lads." Killing an enemy in foreign lands is still far off for "the lads". For the moment they're still trying to get past basic training. It's a deliberately brutal regime, as preparation for an elite fighting force needs to be. The hopefuls in Troop 174 aren't coping and their prospects for passing the infamous assault course known as Bottom Field look dire.
This episode follows the travails of recruit Adam Greene, an events management graduate who struggles with leadership responsibilities and the physicality of the training. He seems a nice bloke and his dream of becoming a commando is dissolving under the strain. Does he have what it takes to be a cold-hearted killer fighting for his country or will he struggle through and avoid going home to the ridicule of those who reckon he's a failure? Have a guess.
Bones, Seven, 8.30pm
Daisy (Carla Gallo) is back in the office, 8 months preggers. But is this the real Daisy? She's under the influence of a birth doula and has come over all hoodoo-guru spiritual. So un-scientific, so unlike her. But it doesn't stop her trying to solve the murder the team is investigating, even between contractions. An acid-drenched skeleton was discovered in a fracking pit and a bunch of cryptic clues leads them to a coven of crossword compilers riven by jealousy and professional competition. Who knew wordsmithing could be so deadly?
Gordon Farrer
PAY TV
Hidden Killers of the Victorian Home, History, 9.30pm
A morbidly fascinating documentary in which historian Suzannah Lipscomb looks at the many strange and horrible ways in which Victorian household items could kill you. One of those items was borax, a toxic chemical used to mask the taste of sour milk. Even if the borax didn't do you in, it made it easier for you to chug milk that was humming with tuberculosis. One estimate has it that extrapulmonary tuberculosis from milk killed as many as 500,000 children in Victorian Britain and left countless others with horrific spinal deformities. If you dodged that bullet there were still lead-based food colourings, flammable celluloid clothing and fatal scalds from gas-powered baths. It's sad but enlightening stuff, and a fitting follow-on from The Poisoner's Handbook (7.30pm), the feature-length documentary based on Deborah Blum's best-selling history of forensic toxicology.
Ice Pilots, A&E, 5.30pm
A watchable reality series about Buffalo Airways, a 46-aeroplane operation in Canada's frozen north-west, carrying people and supplies to destinations with such evocative names as Yellowknife and Uranium City. What makes things particularly interesting is the age of the fleet – which includes World War II-era DC-3s and Curtiss C-46 Commandos.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Moonraker (1979), Go, 9.30pm
Growing up in the 1970s James Bond films were still a comparative rarity on television: GMV6 in Shepparton had Hollywood war films such as The Bridge at Remagen on tap, but the scheduling of a Sean Connery-era 007 was a rare event. The current plethora of free-to-air channels and the length of the franchise – the 24th Bond is currently in production – means the various iterations of Ian Fleming's character are close to ever-present. What does someone born in the 21st century make of a Roger Moore Bond, from that strange time when the suits were cut with generous width and the lure of America was strong on the storylines? Moonraker, the 11th Bond, goes for space opera grandeur, with a plot involving stolen space shuttles and a climactic shootout involving warring astronauts. Thankfully Michael Lonsdale, as the requisite villain, opts for a quiet megalomania that is still effective.
Dredd (2012), Action Movies (pay TV), 8.30pm
A casebook study of how Hollywood once maligned the comic book instead of carefully worshipping its four-colour contours, 1995's Judge Dredd turned the ultra-violent, monosyllabic 2000 AD character into a pugnacious hero played by Sylvester Stallone. This tidy 2012 version, made in the wake of District 9 and The Raid, was very much a reinstatement of the original ethos, with a permanently visored Karl Urban as an unyielding lawmaker who ventures into a 200-storey housing estate tower in Mega-City One, in the company of the requisite rookie, Anderson (Olivia Thirlby). Dredd is Dirty Harry unbound, a legalised judge, jury and executioner who takes right-wing fantasies to their ultimate conclusion, and screenwriter Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Never Let Me Go) places him amid dystopic grime and strange beauty – the drug dealers who control Peach Trees traffic Slo-Mo, a narcotic that reduces perception of time to 1 per cent of its usual speed. It's an intrinsically cinematic concept – life as the ultimate Michael Bay high.
Craig Mathieson