Tchaikovsky Cycle | Julia Bradbury's Canal Walks | Game Of Thrones | The Unofficial Royal Wedding | Dambusters: Building The Bouncing Bomb | Case Sensitive
Tchaikovsky Cycle
8pm, Sky Arts 2
The Tchaikovsky Cycle is a sequence of six episodes, each dedicated to one of the Russian composer's symphonies: tonight's debut starts, reasonably enough, with the first Symphony No 1 in G Minor, reputedly the one whose writing stretched Tchaikovsky's abilities furthest. Throughout the series, the viewer is in the capable hands of Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, who leads St Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra. Each symphony is illustrated further with the views of those who have studied Tchaikovsky and performed his works, bringing alive the man as well as his music.
Andrew Mueller
Julia Bradbury's Canal Walks
8.30pm, BBC4
New series in which Ms Bradbury dons her sensible trainers and traipses along the towpaths of some of Britain's most picturesque canals, once the arteries that made Britain an international trading force. In this opener, she takes in eight miles of the Caledonian Canal, ingeniously devised by 19th-century engineer Thomas Telford to link the mountainous terrain between Inverness and Fort William and stem the decline of the Highlands following the clearances. A visual delight, with the Highlands looking all the more beautiful for being rain-soaked.
David Stubbs
Game Of Thrones
9pm, Sky Atlantic
Ned and his wife Catelyn are both in King's Landing taking care of separate bits of business; he's discovering what a chore the job of King's Hand can be, while she gets ever closer to tracking down the owner of the dagger that almost claimed her and Bran's lives. Aiden Gillan joins the cast, but the acting honours, in such an incredible cast, go to young Maisie Williams as Arya: her first "dancing lesson" is an extraordinary scene.
Phelim O'Neill
The Unofficial Royal Wedding
7.10pm, Channel 4
Although billions will have been in thrall to Kate and Will's nuptials, a significant enough number are sufficiently turned off by the whole affair to merit this broader approach to the event. User-generated (also known as cheap) videos will capture the responses of ordinary people to the event, from as far afield as Calcutta and Brooklyn, while there is also time given over to a cast of characters including an anarchic ceramicist and artist who has been producing anti-royal wedding memorabilia. DS
Dambusters: Building The Bouncing Bomb
8pm, Channel 4
A baffling revisitation of the Dambusters legend. The back story is the ripping yarn of 617 Squadron, which destroyed
three dams on the Ruhr in 1943, equipped with bouncing bombs designed by Barnes Wallis. This interminable film attempts to "recreate" the mission by having likable Cambridge boffin Dr Hugh Hunt drop unexplosive decoys from a modern aircraft on a fake dam on a lake in Canada. We are apparently expected to be agog with tension vis-�-vis whether or not it will work. But we know that it did when it counted, so there's no reason we should care when it doesn't. AM
Case Sensitive
9pm, ITV1
In the first of a two-parter, detectives Olivia Williams and Darren Boyd arrive at an immaculate designer house in the country to solve the unsettling death of a mother and her daughter. Is it a suicide? How does a hotel employee fit in? And why are the detectives a bit tetchy with each other? Answers tomorrow.
Richard Vine
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/apr/29/tchaikovsky-cycle-tv-watch-this
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