Television: Today's Pick - Hetty Wainthropp Investigates
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Your support makes all the difference.Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (9.30pm BBC1) Patricia Routledge, without diverting in any major degree from the mannerisms and cadences of Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances, manages to express a completely different character - her cosily steely Lancashire private eye whose terms of reference are "no sex scandals, no divorce, no drug-running and no industrial espionage". So what does she do? In the first episode of this returning series she tries to put an end to a reign of terror by the bad boy on a local housing estate, posing as the sister-in-law from Ireland of a district nurse whose car has just been torched. Derek Benfield is once again Hetty's husband Robert (shades of the long-suffering Richard in Keeping Up Appearances). Dominic Mon plays plays her young assistant (a nice touch this) Geoffrey.
War Walks (8pm BBC2) Richard Holmes's party trick this week is to play a mounted dragoon as he visits the battlefield of Naseby - scene of the Royalists' Civil War defeat in 1645. Like Hastings and Bosworth, it seems to have been a fine thing, this time turning on Prince Rupert's rash decision to go off looking for booty when it all seemed in the bag. That and some superior cavalry tactics from a certain Oliver Cromwell.
The Film - 8 1/2 (1.25am C5) Was Federico Fellini a passing fashion? Maybe it's time to check out his famous autobiographical phantasmagoria from 1963, with Marcello Mastroianni as the movie director around whom the "circus" of cinema (a rather conventional metaphor) swirls. Mastroianni is at a health resort to find a treatment for an unspecified illness. He is fed up with his mistress (Sandra Milo), can't find the inspiration for a production he's about to start, and is hounded by would-be stars.
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