Kitchen Cabinet, ABC, 8pm

OK, so far this season we’ve had politicians so well known they even have their own mononyms. There was ScoMo and then Albo. But this week there’s someone a little more obscure, as Annabel herself admits, ‘‘the mysterious Ricky Muir’’, who actually requires two names to be barely recognised. That should change because, as we learn, the senator and Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party member is one of the most genuine, guileless and caring politicians we’ve had in ages. And also quite the character. His office is a bar in his Gippsland home, he happily admits to ditching school for dirt-bike riding, ran his own YouTube channel before politics and can knock out an excellent coal-cooked trout over an open fire. What more could you want for a dinner partner?

Blindspot, Seven, 8.30pm

By now you know the set-up:  a mysterious woman (played by Jaimie Alexander) with no memory but a body covered in tattoos is picked up by the FBI, who discover the various ink is all clues to crimes either past or future. This week, however, the action revolves around the one tattoo nobody’s supposed to see, the one under a patch of black, that shows (with the help of a super special machine that goes ‘‘bing!’’) she might have been a Navy SEAL. And when a jewel thief with the same tattoo is caught at a crime scene, maybe agent Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) finally has someone who knows who she is. Another great action-filled chapter from a series that steps things up every week.

The Paedophile Next Door, ABC2, 9.15pm

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare, discovering the quiet person next door has a dark past of preying on children. For most, the reaction is simple – I want them gone. But as this harrowing documentary shows, that doesn’t necessarily work. The problem of paedophilia is (in Britain at least, where this was filmed, and presumably elsewhere) so widespread and growing too fast for authorities to cope. Moving someone who preys on kids just shifts the issue elsewhere, so what to do? This is tough going, with some utterly heartbreaking victim interviews – heed the warnings up front and mind who’s in the room – but some radical ideas are floated and hopefully by shining a light on this horribly dark area, things may change for the better.
Scott Ellis

PAY TV

Wodehouse in Exile, BBC First, 9.40pm

‘‘This is,’’ an indignant British propaganda broadcast assures us at the outset, ‘‘a sombre story of honour pawned to the Nazis for the price of a soft bed in a luxury hotel.’’ The makers of this telemovie, though, take the opposite view, and they’re determined that we ingest it, whether it be by spoon-feeding or by force-feeding. P.G. Wodehouse, they iterate over and over again, was simply a bumbling, befuddled and hopelessly naive old duffer. He could never have imagined that the little radio broadcasts he made at the invitation of the Nazis were part of a propaganda campaign designed to keep theUnited States out of the war and set AdolfHitler’s conquest of Europe in stone. Tim Piggott-Smith makes a wonderful Wodehouse, all mousy pluck, damp-eyed adoration of his formidable wife, Ethel (Zoe Wanamaker), and desperate desire not to be a bother to anyone. The Wodehouses, we see, were living a happy little life in France when the Wehrmacht rolled in and packed Britain’s best-loved comic writer off to an internment camp in Upper Silesia. Having endured a procession of Nazi characters who might have come straight from filming a new season of ’Allo ’Allo!, Wodehouse finds himself the subject of a post-war treason investigation. Luckily, an adoring British Army Intelligence major by the name of Malcolm Muggeridge (Julian Rhind-Tutt) isthere to see him through. You mightn’t want Wodehouse to be hanged,  but you’ll probably want to wring his neck .

MOVIES

The Three Musketeers (2011) Action Movies (pay TV), 4.45pm

When Alexandre Dumas lay dying, it is unlikely his last thoughts were gratitude for not living to see what the cinema would do to his work. That was because the cinema hadn’t been invented yet. But had it been, such concerns would have been correct, for cinema has not been kind. Yes, many people love the boisterous 1948 American version with Gene Kelly, and Richard Lester’s 1973 version is a near classic, but the other 50-odd attempts represent slim pickings. And if one looks at Paul W. S. Anderson’s 2011 free adaptation (with Matthew Macfadyen as Athos, Orlando Bloom as Buckingham and an atrocious Christoph Waltz as Richelieu), one can only weep in despair. This is a travesty in every known way, a mindless rebooting of a masterpiece for those who find comic books too demanding. I paid to see this and I want my money back.

Videodrome (1983) SBS2, 10.30pm

Videodrome is a head-exploding cult classic from Canadian director David Cronenberg, made in the days when he was known more for grossed-out genre movies (Shivers, Rabid) than adult forays into the cinema of the mind (A Dangerous Method). It is the story of a small-time television boss, Max Wren (James Woods), who sees market-share potential via increasingly pornographic programming. So, he is more than excited by the discovery of Videodrome, a television source that specialises in torture and murder. Max pirates the material and his ratings improve, but piracy is just the beginning of a journey that will lead to further depravity and death. Despite the in-your-face nature of the images and situations, many critics found great merit in Cronenberg’s film, arguing he was denouncing the way capitalism goes to ever-increasing extremes to exploit humans for a buck. They didn’t seem to notice or care that Cronenberg appears to be doing the same, a view not helped by interviews the director gave where he seems to deliberately contradict himself, as if suggesting any search for narrative meaning is futile. Cronenburg loves his outsider status and has never been a favourite of feminists, given what some of his female characters are made to go through. Sure, his male characters are also demeaned, but too often Cronenberg’s films represent female sexuality as shrill and dangerous. And Cronenberg didn’t help his cause, after sparring with a television interviewer, by saying: ‘‘On the show, she was very seductive and wore a red dress. She was very sexually provocative.’’ 
Scott Murray