TV tonight: Daisy May Cooper’s twisted comedy is a peculiar treat

Cooper stars in cracking new BBC One series, Am I Being Unreasonable? Plus, it’s the Strictly launch show. Here’s what to watch this evening

Am I Being Unreasonable?

9.50pm, BBC One

Postponed from last week, Daisy May Cooper’s peculiar tragi-comedy is well worth the wait. Tonight’s first of six episodes will have you horrified one moment and hooting with laughter the next – with a dark secret holding it all together. Nic (Cooper) is a bored mother of one who is unhappy in her marriage and privately grieving somebody she cannot tell anyone about. She befriends fellow mum Jen (Selin Hizli – Cooper’s real-life best mate), but can she really trust this curious new wine-guzzling partner in crime? Lenny Rush is particularly hilarious as Nic’s exasperated young son, Ollie, while Jack Thorne (This Is England, Enola Holmes) produces the series. Hollie Richardson

Strictly Come Dancing

7pm, BBC One

Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice kick off the new series with a reprise of their winning routine – AKA last year’s best TV moment. Then it’s time to get the newly spray-tanned celebrities into their sequins and partnered up with the professionals. Matt Goss, Fleur East and Ellie Simmonds are just some of the 15 contestants who will be shimmying and shaking. HR

Strictly lineup: James Bye, Kym Marsh, Hamza Yassin; Tyler West; Tony Adams; Kaye Adams; Jayde Adams; Helen Skelton; Fleur East; Richie Anderson; Molly Rainford; Matt Goss; Ellie Simmonds; Will Mellor; Ellie Taylor,BBC,Ray Burmiston
Da-da-da-da-da-da-daah! … the 2022 Strictly lineup. Photograph: Ray Burmiston/BBC

Ghosts

8.30pm, BBC One

Now in its fourth season, Jim Howick’s supernatural sitcom is still on top comedy form. When Alison (Charlotte Ritchie) finally welcomes the first guests to her new B&B, scoutmaster Pat (Jim Howick) teaches peasant Mary (Katy Wix) about holidays. HR

Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing

9pm, BBC Two

Is it just us, or are the camera crew going wild for beautiful closeups of nature in this (fifth) series of the two comics’ fishing expeditions? Other than that, it’s everything you would expect from the duo’s pursuit of trout around the Scottish Highlands – warm, twinkly, bucolic and utterly lovely. Alexi Duggins

Munich Games

9pm, Sky Atlantic

The race is on to prevent a major terrorist attack in episode four of the high-stakes thriller: “If we don’t find Kresnik within the next 10 hours, there won’t be a game … ” Meanwhile, Maria Köhler’s (Seyneb Saleh) clandestine affair with her Syrian refugee informant Monir Aziz (Roger Azar) is exposed and she is suspended from duty. Ali Catterall

Martin Compston’s Scottish Fling

9.30pm, BBC Two

With his great pal Phil MacHugh, the Line of Duty actor hits the road along the east coast with stops at St Andrews, Dundee and Aberdeen tonight. “Where did the sun go?” is a question you really do not expect two Scots to ask on a beach. HR

Film choice

Sidney Poitier … subject of a new documentary
Sidney Poitier … the groundbreaking actor is the subject of a new documentary film. Photograph: Bob Adelman

Sidney (Reginald Hudlin, 2022), Apple TV+
This Oprah-produced documentary about the life of the groundbreaking actor Sidney Poitier, who died in January, may ladle on the affection but he is one man who deserves it. The son of tomato farmers in the Bahamas, his rise to Hollywood success is told in his own mellifluous words and those of an impressive array of devotees, friends and family members. Poitier’s firsts are numerous – Black lead character, Oscar winner, that In the Heat of the Night slap – and, even when Black Power threatened to make him passé, his influence on African American culture and the US as a whole persisted. Simon Wardell

Athena (Romain Gavras, 2022), Netflix
A near cousin of Ladj Ly’s superb Les Misérables (Ly is a co-writer), this tense urban thriller from Romain Gavras plunges us into the middle of an already volatile French estate. Via expertly choreographed extended takes, we hurtle through a chaotic concrete war zone as Karim (Sami Slimane) orchestrates a riot to force the truth about his 13-year-old brother’s killing – seemingly at the hands of cops – out into the open. However, his surviving siblings, soldier Abdel (Dali Benssalah) and drug dealer Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), become obstacles in his path. SW

Live sport

International Men’s football: Italy v England 7pm, Channel 4. The Uefa Nations League Group A3 return fixture at the San Siro in Milan, following a 0-0 draw at Molineux in June.

Contributors

Hollie Richardson, Alexi Duggins, Ali Catterall and Simon Wardell

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