What's on TV: Sunday, April 8
movie Hidden Figures (2017)
Premiere Movies (pay TV), 4.20pm
The Seven Ages of Elvis gives a new perspective on the King.
Photo: AF archive / Alamy Stock PhotoA lot of historical events are being retold at the moment, to help correct misinterpretations, praise the overlooked and change social attitudes. Some of these films have been noble and inspiring, others alarmingly dishonest. Sarah Gavron's Suffragette, for one, pretends that a feminist moment created and run by aristocratic and upper-middle-class women was actually a working-class phenomenon. Historical truth was overridden by the film's political agenda. As for Theodore Melfi's Hidden Figures, it examines the role of African American female mathematicians at NASA in 1961. It is a heartwarming film that won a massive audience, and was acclaimed for reminding the world of a time of segregation. But Allisson Schroeder's script pretends things were worse at NASA than they actually were, by hiding the promotions of African American women like Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) that had begun more than a decade earlier. Inconvenient truth has once again been overridden.
Scott Murray
pay Crimes that Shook Australia
Crime + Investigation, 7.30pm
A typically sober and methodical episode laying out the squalid crimes of so-called "Black Widow" Patricia Byers, who murdered one lover and tried to murder another in order to profit from their deaths in the 1990s. Despite the bizarre details of the attempted-murder case – she shot her lover in the head on a yacht anchored in Queensland's Moreton Bay then claimed that pirates must have done it – there's a grim banality about the whole thing. The program enlists detectives, a prosecutor and a forensic expert involved in the murder case to explain how Byers' lies unravelled, thanks in part to a cheap portable typewriter. The story has a strange coda in the new batch of lies that Byers told in 2016 in the hope of winning parole. Viewers in search of less depressing stuff can flip over to Animal Planet for When Turkeys Attack.
Brad Newsome
The Seven Ages of Elvis
SBS, 11.20pm
It's hard to imagine there's any new way into the story of Elvis, but this feature documentary, which coincides with the 40th anniversary of his death, gives it a good old go, using Shakespeare's "seven ages of man" framework (from the quote about all the world being a stage from As You Like It). The filmmakers have divided Elvis's career into seven stages, from his poverty-stricken childhood in the American south, via Hollywood Elvis through to Las Vegas Elvis. As well as a slew of the usual talking heads – music producers, managers and bodyguards, the number of which are dwindling these days – this film features some of Elvis' high school friends, the producers of his 1968 comeback special, credited with reviving his career, and even the family who made his famous suits in the 1950s. But really, the greatest Shakespearean act of Elvis's was surely his death, after which he become more famous than he had ever been.
Kylie Northover