UK News
‘Starmer on the ropes’ and ‘Sobbin’ Robbins spills the beans’
Saint-Pierre
9pm, U&Alibi
Bilingual dialogue! Sharp suits! Beautiful landscapes! Yes, Shetland meets CSI in this French-Canadian police procedural about disgraced cop Donny “Fitz” Fitzpatrick (Allan Hawco), who gets reassigned to the small island after a personal arrest goes embarrassingly viral. But will his bumbling demeanour work on his new partner, the no-nonsense Geneviève “Arch” Archambaul (Joséphine Jobert)? Phil Harrison
Making a Maestro
8pm, Sky Arts
A wonderful insight into what conductors actually do, as the Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition looks for its next winner. One of the 20 young hopefuls followed here will gain, as Flick describes it, a “passport for the rest of their career”. As they conduct two pieces each – Handel and Schubert – it’s even more stressful than watching Tár. Hollie Richardson
Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy
9pm, BBC Two
The final part of this dispiriting documentary focuses on the last six years of Jackson’s life as he grappled with yet more financial, legal and reputational crises. Being charged with child molestation in 2003 triggered the most sensational US trial since OJ Simpson: a “three-ring circus of bizarre”, as one witness puts it. Graeme Virtue
Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future
9pm, Channel 4
Perry winds up his two-part tour in San Francisco to meet people at the heart of the tech industry: designers creating robots that help autistic children; a twentysomething multimillionaire developer who still lives with his parents; and AI “head honch”, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark. As always, Grayson is open-minded and insightful. Lucinda Everett
The ’Burbs
9pm, Sky One
A few possible answers this week as this solid but slightly superfluous reboot of the 80s comic horror continues. Rob and Naveen are under suspicion, but could the roots of their odd behaviour be sadness rather than badness? Meanwhile, Lynn has an alarming experience with some sleeping pills. What is Samira up to? PH
Twenty Twenty Six
10pm, BBC Two
Things change; things stay the same. Ian Fletcher is forever flustered, Will is still Will, only more so. But since 2012, we’ve had to get our heads around Zoom (cue mishaps with a David Beckham virtual meeting) and the correct way to address non-binary online activists. Can Fletcher’s team placate the environmental podcast Call This Shit Out? Ali Catterall
Film choice
The Man with Two Brains (Carl Reiner, 1983), 4.25am, Sky Cinema Greats
A key work from Steve Martin’s 1980s heyday, this homage to/spoof of 50s sci-fi movies is a kitchen sink’s worth of sight gags and wordplay. Martin is in typically manic mode as groundbreaking brain surgeon Michael Hfuhruhurr (“It sounds just the way it’s spelt”) who marries Kathleen Turner’s gloriously venal, libidinous femme fatale Dolores. But then he falls for the disembodied but still living brain of Anne Uumellmahaye – an uncredited Sissy Spacek. Simon Wardell
“Centre stage we have Saraya, who is this mouthy, irreverent outsider, complicated, flawed, and it’s her journey of realising all those attributes are the things that make her really special,” Cooper said. “We’ve been speaking to her and she is awesome.”
The Druzhba pipeline carrying Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia is ready to resume operations, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday, after Ukraine repaired the damage from a Russian attack. Kyiv now expects the EU to unlock a €90bn EU loan after Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, spent months blocking it. Orbán is about to leave office after losing badly in national elections.
“There can now be no grounds for blocking it,” said Ukraine’s president, referring to the loan. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, speaking after a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg on Tuesday, said she expected a positive decision on the loan within 24 hours. Reuters, quoting an industry source, said pumping oil through the pipeline would resume on Wednesday.
Zelenskyy has repeatedly called on Europe to diversify energy supplies and not resume flows via Druzhba from Russia. “No one can currently guarantee that Russia will not repeat attacks on the pipeline infrastructure,” he said on Tuesday.
Guns were fired as Ukrainian authorities arrested military draft officers in Odesa for allegedly snatching people from the street and extorting money using the threat of being sent straight to the frontline. The Security Service of Ukraine said four officers working for the local territorial recruitment centre – which carries out conscription and recruitment – were detained after agents including special forces shot at the tyres of a vehicle in which they tried to escape. The group was being investigated for extortion, said the SBU. “The perpetrators face up to 12 years in prison with confiscation of property.”
Moscow is taking its Ukraine war tactics and techniques “beyond the battlefield” to target the UK and Europe in cyberspace, the head of Britain’s cybersecurity force at GCHQ will say on Wednesday. Richard Horne will point to “sustained Russian hybrid activity” and warn that companies must learn how it is done in order to defend themselves. Horne is head of the national cybersecurity centre at Britain’s signals intelligence agency. He is due to speak at the CyberUK conference in the Scottish city of Glasgow.
In recent months, Sweden, Poland, Denmark and Norway have all reported hackers linked to Russia have targeted their critical infrastructure including power plants and dams. Horne will say that in Britain the NCSC currently handles around four “nationally significant” cyber incidents a week with the most serious threat coming from cyber-attacks carried out directly or indirectly by other states. He mentioned Russia, China and Iran.
In a conflict, Horne will say, the UK would probably face cyber-attacks “at scale” but – unlike with ransomware deployed by organised criminal hackers – companies would not be able to pay their way out. For that reason, he will say, every organisation needs to understand the “full extent” of the risk they face and improve their cyber defences.
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