ABC1's blog

6:10pm – Tuesday, August 11 on ABC1

The second series of this acclaimed program returns to uncover the past and solve mysteries using a mixture of archaeology, forensics and geneaology.

In Northern France, an excavation yields evidence of WW1 mortar bombs. Its position reveals it to be a trench that was key to the Allied taking of ‘Hill 70′ during the summer of 1917.

The trench detectives begin a search for the tight-knit band of brothers who fought there, revealing the name of a Canadian soldier who led the group into battle. As they close in on how he came to be there, they uncover the moving, Dickensian story of this ‘Barnardo Boy’.

The soldier was the eldest of three English orphans rescued from the crushing slums of a northern steel town in Britain and shipped to Canada where the children were sent their separate ways. None were told where the others were, but all were bound by a strong desire to reunite.

This Barnardo Boy episode was awarded the 2009 Golden Sheaf for Best History Documentary.

4:10pm – Tuesday, August 11 on ABC1

Pinky and Perky are a pair of lovable twin piglets who have just been given their big break in television – their own live TV show full of crazy stunts, wild games, anarchic cartoons and top celebrity guests. Their show is loud, messy and frequently out of control, which makes it a huge hit with the kids at home – and very unpopular with some of the grownups at the TV station.

Episode one: Pup Idol – Tuesday August 11 at 4:10pm, ABC1 Pinky and Perky arrive at PPCTV to the sound of screaming fans who are eagerly awaiting the arrival of Jason Jasons – a mega pop star booked to appear on their show. But when he arrives and starts making demands, Pinky and Perky are less than impressed. However, when Jason’s top celebrity agent Simon Cow promises Perky the chance of a glittering music career, he is instantly won over, but Pinky smells a rat! Pinky’s suspicions turn out to be well-founded, but before he can reveal Jason’s dark secret, he has to contend with Simon Cow’s devious double-crossing tactics.

Episode two: The Menacing Phantom – Wednesday August 12 at 4:10pm, ABC1 TV boss and the piglets’ uncle, Sir Percival, is out of town and has requested a spooky Halloween special while he’s away. Top rock band Bat Sabbath are due to appear on the show and lead singer Batty Belagosi is enjoying playing pranks on a terrified Perky. Meanwhile, Pinky is busy practising drawing monsters and when he gets a visit from cartoon whiz Barbara Hannah announcing she’s his biggest fan, he’s over the moon! But just as Perky thinks he’s managed to escape his troublesome tormentor, he encounters an even creepier character – a frightening figure who calls himself ‘The Phantom’ and who seems intent on destroying The Pinky and Perky Show!

9:35pm – Monday, August 10 on ABC1

Swapping the Ford Cortina for a red Audi Quattro, DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) rolls up his sleeves and embraces the ’80s in the sequel to the critically acclaimed and phenomenally popular Life on Mars.

Set in 1981, everyone’s favourite politically-incorrect cop, flanked by his faithful sidekicks DS Ray Carling (Dean Andrews) and DC Chris Skelton (Marshall Lancaster), turns his attentions to taking on the ‘southern nancy’ criminal scum in the nation’s capital.

Gene, however, does not expect to be thrown together with the sexy, intelligent, DCI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes – Spooks). Single mother to daughter Molly, Alex has rapidly risen through the ranks of the Met and, in the modern world of 2008, skilfully uses psychological profiling to capture suspects. When Alex and her daughter are kidnapped, she makes a daring attempt at escape, resulting in a horrific accident.

Alex suddenly finds herself in 1981 interacting with familiar characters, not just from her own life time, but also from the detailed reports logged by none other than Sam Tyler, which Alex has previously spent months poring over.

Ripped from her current world of sexual equality and respect, she finds herself faced with the boorish Gene in a two-tone, New Romantic, ’80s London with a soundtrack of Adam Ant, Roxy Music and The Human League ringing in her ears.

Frustrated by each other’s stubbornness, the friction between Alex and Gene heats up. However, as the two titans collide, it becomes apparent there is more than just a professional tension emerging.

6:30pm – Monday, August 10 on ABC1

This week on Talking Heads Peter Thompson’s guest is Wendy Whiteley. Together with her husband Brett, Whiteley was at the centre of the international arts world in the swinging sixties.

They lived for a time at New York’s Chelsea Hotel where their neighbours were Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Miller.

But along with the success and the bohemian glamour came the eventual heroin addiction and the painful affairs that led to their marriage falling apart.

Although they were divorced three years before Brett died, Whiteley has control of his estate and has set up the Brett Whiteley Studio as an art gallery and museum to honour his work.

Plus she’s used her own artistic talents to restore and landscape a derelict site on the edge of Sydney Harbour into a magic garden.

Talking Heads: Wendy Whiteley will be repeated on ABC2 – Tuesday, August 11 at 5:00pm

9:40pm – Sunday, August 9 on ABC1

Two years ago Paul Stewart was dying of liver failure. The former punk rocker’s life of hard drinking and drugs had caught up with him, and he’d been waiting in a Melbourne hospital for 16 months for a donor liver.

“I couldn’t eat anything and was throwing up blood and getting new blood transferred in all the time, and just waiting for that liver… every night crying myself to sleep,” he tells Compass.

A priest had said final prayers when a nun appeared at his bedside. Paul had never met her before but she promised to get all her religious sisters in East Timor to pray for him. Within days Paul received a new liver.

Paul believes his survival was quite simply a miracle which he attributes to the sudden appearance of Sister Helena who, ironically, came from the very place that had robbed him of his brother more than 30 years before.

Paul was 14 when his older brother Tony, a TV sound recordist, was killed with four other Australian-based newsmen in the remote East Timorese village of Balibo.

Paul channelled his adolescent anger over his brother’s death into Australia’s emerging punk rock scene and by the 1980s he was in a band called The Painters & Dockers. Signature tunes included Die Yuppie Die and Nude School.

Later he befriended a young East Timorese exile in Melbourne, Gil Santos, whose father disappeared during Indonesia’s 25 year occupation. Together they started a band called The Dili Allstars.

“We wanted to support East Timor’s fight for independence and music became the perfect vehicle,” says Paul.

Since then the pair have raised money for all sorts of projects in East Timor.

This story is told in Paul’s own words. He goes on a trip to East Timor, his second since his life-saving liver transplant. Accompanied by Gil “the brother I gained” Paul takes along a donor gift of 30 acoustic guitars. He and Gil give them to young, impoverished arts and music students in Dili. They also visit the Alma nuns, qualified physiotherapists, who work with disabled children in the outlying slums.

Compass: My Brother, Balibo And Me will be repeated on ABC2 – Friday, August 14 at 6:00pm

8:35pm – Sunday, August 9 on ABC1

Stephen (Benedict Cumberbatch) comes face to face with his brother Michael (Max Beesley) – whom he buried just days earlier. Despite Stephen’s claims that Yasim (Anamaria Marinca) is safe, Michael remains suspicious and follows Stephen to Russell’s (Robert Carlyle) hideout.

Michael emerges out of the shadows and is reunited with Yasim. Russell is shocked to learn of Michael, but angry they have compromised him and his hideout, so he destroys it and leaves them to fend for themselves.

Nye (David Harewood) and Gibbon (Christopher Fulford) visit a detention centre where a refugee has died from the mysterious virus and find Cooper (Paul Higgins) there, about to perform an autopsy. Nye makes some calls and a clean-up team arrives to remove the body.

Michael persuades the furious Yasim and Stephen to work with him. He’s narrowed the tainted vaccine down to one batch – EZ759 – and wants to blow the conspiracy of silence open. But they need a blood sample from a sick refugee who came in with Michael, which means getting to them before Bepa (Ovidiu Niculescu) helps them disappear.

They arrive at the station just as an alarm sounds and the refugees are removed by police. Michael and Yasim slip away but Stephen is taken to Eleanor (Eva Birthistle). She tells him that Inquirendo will fund the next five years of his research if he leaves now. Thinking he’s lost Yasim, Stephen reluctantly agrees, but as he reaches the airport he has a revelation.

When Turney (Geraldine James) and Eleanor learn Stephen didn’t get his flight they use TIA to strip him of the ability to use his ID.

Within 12 hours of having his ID taken away, Stephen is a shell of his former self. Desperate for help, he goes to see Cooper.

7:30pm – Sunday, August 9 on ABC1

British actor, writer, presenter and author, Stephen Fry, was very nearly an American. In the 50s, just before Stephen was born, his father was offered a job at Princeton University, but chose to turn it down. And so, Stephen was born in NW3 rather than in NJ, New Jersey, and born a Stephen, not a Steve.

In this six-part series Stephen travels, mostly in a London cab (hired in the US), through all 50 states of the country that he could have nearly called home and which has always fascinated him. Along the way, he visits each state, hearing its song, visiting its landmarks and distinctive sites, looking at its unique and quaint laws, talking to its citizens and discovering the true natures of the 50 individual parts that make up the whole.

He takes in the small town life of Independence Day parades, PTA meetings, Summer Camp and cherry-pie bake-offs, the local elections, pageants and swap-meets. From Minnesota in winter to Death Valley, the Badlands, bayous, boondocks and southern plantation houses, Stephen learns that each state contains something marvellous and particular to its people, landscape and urban environments.

In this first episode, Stephen explores the states that make up New England, before heading south to the nation’s capital and ending up at the civil war battlefield of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania.

As he takes to the road, driving through the autumn colours to uncover what really makes America tick, he meets Presidential hopefuls in New Hampshire, witches in Salem, nuclear submariners in Connecticut, deer hunters and small time mobsters in New York City, a Rhode Island socialite, a lobster fisherman in Maine, ice cream blenders in Vermont and car washers in New Jersey.

5:00pm – Sunday, August 9 on ABC1

This week on Sunday Arts, prolific composer and performer Michael Nyman.

Michael Nyman The UK’s Michael Nyman is a prolific composer, musician and performer. He is best known for composing the soundtrack to the film The Piano, and for his work with Peter Greenaway on films which include The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Nyman and his band recently toured Australia and while in the country he stopped by the Sunday Arts studio to perform for us and have a chat with Fenella Kernebone.

Sunday Arts will be repeated on ABC2 – Sunday, August 09 at 7:30pm

Over the last ten years,  Indigenous Australians have seen highs and lows, successes and challenges from Cathy Freeman’s win at the Olympic Games to The Prime Minister’s Apology to The Intervention. With hosts like actress Deb Mailman and politician Aden Ridgeway, ABC TV’s Indigenous program, Message Stick, has been there through it all providing a unique Indigenous perspective and voice.

On Sunday 9th August at 1:30pm ABC TV’s Message Stick celebrates its 10th birthday in two shows in Something to Celebrate by throwing a party and revisiting some of the most inspirational programs shown on Message Stick over the last decade, told by Aboriginal storytellers like Warwick Thornton (Samson & Delilah). Indigenous Australian Idol winner Casey Donovan and comedian Sean Choolburra (Thank God You’re Here) perform while the most significant moments of Message Stick are revisited.

1:30pm – Sunday, August 9 on ABC1

Over two weeks, ABC TV’s Message Stick celebrates its 10th birthday in two shows – Something To Celebrate (Sunday 9 August) and Movers And Shakers (Sunday 16 August) by throwing a party and revisiting some of the most inspirational stories shown on the program over the last decade.

The two programs are a testament to the many extraordinary documentaries produced by our best Indigenous filmmakers over the years. As Aboriginal feature film director and writer, Richard Frankland says, “We’ve got great artists – Kev Carmody, Warwick Thornton, Deb Mailman – all these wonderful storytellers. We don’t need other people to tell our stories anymore. We’ve got Message Stick and our wonderful voice makers to tell our stories.” Something To Celebrate revisits some of Message Stick’s most memorable moments and characters including Cathy Freeman and Deb Mailman, and breaks out of the usual documentary format to have segments from the 10th birthday party itself, filmed in front of a live studio audience. The party features three live acts to complement short historical segments – Casey Donovan, the youngest ever winner of Australian Idol, and her cousin, soul singer Emma Donovan; former Bangarra dancer, Albert David; and stand up comedian, Sean Choolburra, whose credits include the Melbourne Comedy Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Channel 7′s Thank God You’re Here.

Message Stick is the latest program produced by the ABC’s Indigenous Programs Unit (IPU). The IPU was established by the ABC in 1987 with the objective of becoming a centre of excellence for the production of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander television in Australia, and to promote a greater understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Something To Celebrate applauds this achievement.

Message Stick: Something To Celebrate will be repeated on ABC2 – Monday, August 10 at 5:00pm