What's on TV: Tuesday, April 21
Miriam's Big Fat Adventure (premiere)
ABC, 9.30pm
Now well into her 70s, actress Miriam Margolyes sometimes needs a walking stick to get around, but she doesn't appear to have slowed down. In addition to recent acting gigs (Call the Midwife) and regular appearances on Graham Norton's red couch, she's developed a specialty in documentaries where she goes off to investigate a subject. So far, she's applied her curious mind, keen eye and impishly disarming candour to America and different ways of approaching death.
Miriam's Big Fat Adventure
Now she takes on a topic that's painfully close to her heart: obesity. "It's hard being fat," she says sadly near the start of the two-part series. "It's a miserable fate." She intends to investigate the causes of weight gain, society's view of it and what various people do about it. So she attends a weight-loss boot camp, discusses obesity with a behavioural psychologist and talks to "body positive" advocates.
She attends a dance class for generously proportioned women who are proud of their bodies. She considers how society judges people who are overweight as lazy and lacking self-control, and the impact of that dismissive assessment. It's a personal and often moving exploration, and also one that has wider application.