Pick of the Week

The Hills Are Alive: A Year at Kylemore Abbey

Sunday, RTÉ One, 6.30pm

Kylemore Abbey in the heart of Connemara in Co Galway is one of Ireland’s most popular visitor attractions, with more than half a million visitors from at home and abroad every year. But there was a time when the abbey was becoming rundown and neglected – until the Benedictine nuns who lived there made a huge leap of faith and transformed their crumbling home into a sparkling jewel of the region, shining brightly over scenic Pollacappul Lake. This three-part documentary takes us inside the workings of the abbey, following the nuns over a year as they work hard to maintain it – and also their religious way of life, which is threatened by a precipitous fall in vocations. Forget Julie Andrews – these nuns not only sing, but also cook wonderful meals for visitors to the abbey’s restaurant, craft home-made soap and chocolate for their thriving mail-order business and use their horticultural skills to create lush gardens and woodlands on the estate’s vast grounds. The abbey was once owned by a wealthy British politician, but the Benedictine nuns have called it home for the past 100 years. During the year the cameras were there, the enclosed order mourned the passing of their abbess and celebrated the election of a new abbess and the opening of a new monastery and retreat centre. The three-part documentary, narrated by Megan Cusack of the acting dynasty, brings us insights into the daily lives of the resourceful nuns at Kylemore as they follow their principle of ora et labora – prayer and work – and meet the challenge of embracing tourism and commerce while maintaining a thriving and sustainable religious community. The nuns also talk candidly about the challenges of attracting new recruits to the religious life and the difficult but rewarding work keeping this vast estate ticking over.

Highlights

The Manhattan Project in Colour

Saturday, Channel 4, 8pm

Cillian Murphy blew us away as the father of the atomic bomb in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, and this documentary brings the real Robert Oppenheimer to full-colour life as he leads a team racing to develop a working atomic weapon during the second World War, driven by fear the Nazis would beat them to the ultimate doomsday weapon. The hour-long documentary takes archive footage from the project and applies the latest colourisation tech to vividly tell story of the Manhattan Project and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago.

Ridley

Sunday, UTV, 8pm

Adrian Dunbar has taken his good old time to return to our screens as retired detective turned police consultant Alex Ridley, but fans will no doubt agree it’ll have been worth the wait. Series two sees Ridley teaming up once again with DI Carol Farman (Bronagh Waugh) to solve some tricky and puzzling crimes, which include a murder during a jewellery heist, a man shot dead at an illegal rave, and the mysterious disappearance of a well-liked local woman. Each two-episode is written by Paul Matthew Thompson and Michael Bhim, the team behind the acclaimed Vera, and by Midsomer Murders writer Julia Gilbert. The return of Ridley after three years had set off speculation about a possible new series of Line of Duty, in which Dunbar stars as police chief Ned Hastings, and Dunbar has revealed that writer Jed Mercurio is busy working on a script for series seven of the hugely popular series. “We’re keeping our fingers crossed that next year we’ll be working on a new series,” Dunbar told the Times newspaper. “No doubt Jed will think of some interesting twists and turns.

Panorama: Lucy Letby – Who to Believe?

Monday, BBC One, 8pm

If there is one crime cast that has completely divided opinion, it has to be the case of nurse Lucy Letby, who was found guilty of murdering seven babies, and also found guilty of attempted murder of another seven infants. But though Letby’s guilt is now taken as fact, and the clamour for more charges to be brought against her continues to grow louder, different voices are saying there’s a possibility Letby may be innocent of these unimaginable crimes, and that her multiple convictions are based on wrong medical evidence. An international panel has examined the case against Letby, and says there is no evidence that Letby has committed any crime at all. When both the prosecution and defence have relied on complex medical evidence to prove their side of the story, who do you believe? Reporter Judith Moritz tries to untangle the conflicting testimonies, but finds both sides’ arguments deeply flawed.

In Flight

Tuesday, Channel 4, 9pm

Flight attendant and single mother Jo Conran faces a parent’s worst nightmare when her son, Sonny, finds himself banged up in a Bulgarian prison accused of murder. But Jo’s nightmare is about to get worse, as a ruthless criminal gang leader threatens to have Sonny killed, and the only way to save his life is for Jo to smuggle drugs for the gang on board international flights. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Jo calls on her ex-boyfriend, customs officer Dom Delaney, for help, but soon she is dragged deeper into a world of corruption and violence. Katherine Kelly plays Jo, with Stuart Martin as crime boss Cormac Kelleher and Ashley Thomas as Dom, in a violent, nail-biting thriller that will make Jackie Brown look a bit tame.

VJ Day 80: We Were There

Wednesday, BBC Two, 9pm

August 15th is Victory over Japan Day, or VJ Day, when the surrender of Japan signalled the end of the war in the Pacific 80 years ago. To mark this anniversary, Rachel Burden traces the stories of the last veterans who were there in the closing days of the second World War, and gets first-hand accounts of such events as the invasion of British Malaya and the bombing of Hiroshima – including one woman who was caught right under the mushroom cloud as the atomic bomb exploded, a former child prisoner in Singapore, and former prisoners-of-war forced into hard labour on the Burma railroad. Some of these veterans are now more than 100 years old, but their accounts of their wartime experiences still ring fresh across the decades.

Breaking Out

Wednesday, RTÉ One, 10.35pm

Well worth another viewing, this 2021 documentary film by Michael McCormack tells the story of Fergus O’Farrell, the charismatic singer and leader of great lost Irish band Interference. O’Farrell is an inspiring talent, who used a wheelchair following a diagnosis of muscular dystrophy, but made music unconfined by genre, a joyous blend of trad, folk, rock and whatever you’re having yourself. He formed Interference in 1984, and though they never attracted the big chequebook-waving record companies, they were a huge influence on many up-and-coming Irish bands, including The Frames. McCormack’s film brings us back to O’Farrell’s teenage years in Dublin and his travels to the Czech Republic, New York and finally back home to west Cork, and chronicles the 10 years leading to his death in 2016 as he struggled with his progressive illness and gained support from a range of musical admirers – and from his own wife, Li, and his family. O’Farrell’s music can be heard on the soundtracks for John Carney’s Once and Sing Street, while Interference are still performing, with a line-up of O’Farrell’s friends including Glen Hansard, Paul Tiernan and Maurice Seezer.

Streaming

Alien: Earth

From Wednesday, August 13th, Disney+

It’s 2120 and the world is ruled by just five big corporations. So no change there. But at least artificial intelligence has come on a bit, and humans now share the planet with synthetics, which is to say humanoid robots fitted with AI, and cyborgs, or humans with lots of mechanical parts added in. And the world is on the verge of another breakthrough: a new tech that allows robots to be fitted with human consciousness. Wendy (Sydney Chandler) is the prototype of this new hybrid species, but when a deep-space research vessel crash-lands on Earth, letting loose species collected on its travels, it doesn’t matter whether you’re human, synthetic or hybrid: you’re bound to have some nasty things gripping your face and bursting out of your chest. This new show – the first TV series in the Alien franchise – is created by Noah Hawley, with original Alien director Ridley Scott in the executive producer’s chair. While the Alien films long ago lost all sense of cohesion, here’s a chance to reset the dial and get back to sci-fi horror basics: humans (and cyborgs, synthetics and hybrids) battling to stop the xenomorphs before they kill everybody on the planet.

Love Is Blind: UK

From Wednesday, August 13th, Netflix

How far would you go to win the grand prize in a reality dating show? Snog? Have it off in the hot tub? How about marrying someone before you’ve even seen what they look like? This is the challenge facing the singletons in this second series of the UK version of the hit TV series. They’ll spend 10 days in their own pods, where they’ll be able to chat to each other via speaker, but the only visual they’ll get is a sort of blurry outline through a blue translucent barrier. They’ll have to rely on their lively personalities and scintillating conversation to attract a potential partner. So basically Blind Date retooled for millennials. To meet your beau or belle face to face, though, you’ll have to propose marriage. The betrothed couples will then move in together, to plan their wedding – and find out if they actually fancy each other. The final stage is the wedding day: will they go through with it or chicken out before going up the aisle? The hosts are the husband-and-wife duo of Matt and Emma Willis, who I believe actually clapped eyes on each other before they got hitched.

Limitless: Live Better Now

From Friday, August 15th, Disney+

The actor Chris Hemsworth resumes his quest for the holy grail of healthy, happy, holistic living in this second series for National Geographic, and this time he’s taking on some head-spinning challenges, including scaling a 180m climbing wall in the Swiss Alps, being electrocuted and pepper-sprayed as part of special-forces training, and learning to play the drums in time to perform with Ed Sheeran in front of 70,000 screaming fans. Hemsworth enlists help from an army of experts, including the cognitive scientist Dr Maya Shankar, the free-solo climber Steph Davis, the MMA fighter Kim Dong-hyun and the drummer Ben Gordon.