What's on TV: Sunday, October 14

Slumdog Millionaire

7Flix, 10.45pm

Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire is a David-and-Goliath story, with the boomtown of Mumbai playing Goliath to Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), an 18-year-old tea boy who wangles his way onto the quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and doggedly begins to win — to the delight of the show's audience and the chagrin of its host, Prem Kumar (Bollywood veteran Anil Kapoor). The script — by The Full Monty's Simon Beaufoy – is based on Q&A, an ingenious but scrappy first novel by Vikas Swarup. The film is so thoroughly infused with the vitality, the horror and the gallows humour of Indian life on the edge that melodrama becomes dirty realism – with a flourish.