Calum Henderson: Top things to watch and listen to right now

Daisy May Cooper stars as a young working-class single mum living with her ten-year-old daughter in Rain Dogs. Photo / Supplied

Rain Dogs (Neon, from Wednesday)

Costello Jones is the textbook definition of a lovable rogue. When we first meet her at the start of the new BBC/HBO dark comedy Rain Dogs she’s being kicked out of her flat, along with her 10-year-old daughter, Iris, and a couple of bin bags of their stuff, just under £3000 short on the rent. “Thing is, bubs,” she explains philosophically, “If you live an interesting life people are always going to be chasing after you.”The series is created by Cash Carraway, and inspired by her own interesting life, which she detailed in the 2019 memoir Skint Estate: Life on the Poverty Line. That book saw her lauded as “the voice of her generation” and “the next Bukowski” by the chilled-out and understated UK press, and it won’t be a surprise if the same level of enthusiasm is extended to her first foray into television. But for all the praise as Carraway’s funny, spiky script deserves, Daisy May Cooper deserves an equally large bouquet for the way she brings it to life with the perfect mix of swagger and heart. Life on the poverty line means this is far from the first time she’s been booted out of her flat – “not again,” sighs the man at the laundromat when she dumps her bin bags and says she’ll pick them up tomorrow. Salvation this time comes from a man she has saved in her phone as “Selby – do not answer”. The private-school-educated Florian Selby (Jack Farthing) is a louche dandy in the underworld who’s just waltzed out of prison and back into Costello’s life. He spells nothing but trouble but he’s got Costello’s back – and importantly, three grand. So much happens in the first episode, so many memorable scenes, only to end up exactly where we started. This is a series that understands that that’s just life sometimes.

Desperate Measures sees Sherlock star Amanda Abbington play diligent bank clerk Rowan Taylor. Photo / Supplied

Desperate Measures (TVNZ+, from Monday)

Desperate times call for a dark and serious-looking British thriller miniseries that majorly pushes the limits of plausibility, and that’s exactly what we have in Desperate Measures. Amanda Abbingdon (Sherlock) plays Rowan – bank teller, single mum to a 15-year-old son, saddled with inherited debt. The desperate measures promised by the title come after her son gets caught up in a botched drug deal on the estate and ends up owing local gangsters quite a few thousand quid. Enter her career criminal ex (Luther’s Warren Brown), with whom she teams up to do the only thing you can do in times like these: rob a bank.

The eight-episode series follows Eugene Levy as he visits some of the world's most beautiful and intriguing destinations. Photo / supplied

The Reluctant Traveller (Apple TV+)

All sorts of different travellers have hosted TV travel documentaries over the years: intrepid ones, curious ones, just-happy-to-be-there ones . . . It says a lot, though hard to say what exactly, that the current trend is for reluctant and/or just plain idiotic travellers. Eugene Levy (Schitt’s Creek, many memorable movie roles) is thankfully only the former, and a good-natured example at that, so he actually makes for fine company while we armchair visit the luxury accommodations and quirky attractions of slightly off-the-beaten-path locales from Finland to Costa Rica, South Africa to Portugal.

On an adventure, brothers Wirt and Greg get lost in the Unknown, a strange forest adrift in time. Photo / Supplied

Over the Garden Wall (Neon)

TV shows starring Elijah Wood, Melanie Lynskey and Christopher Lloyd don’t come along every day, even if they are animated. First aired on Cartoon Network in 2014, this 10-episode series is a surreal story of two half-brothers who discover an enchanted forest behind their home, where they encounter strange creatures including a bluebird with the voice of Melanie Lynskey. It’s weird, wonderful and worth checking out if you’re into this sort of thing – creator Patrick Hale was a writer and creative director for cult favourite cartoon Adventure Time, and his most recent credit was co-writing Guillermo Del Toro’s incredibly well-received Pinnochio.

Movie of the Week: All That Breathes (Neon)

One of the nominees in the running for the Best Documentary crown at this year’s Academy Awards (alongside Fire of Love, which is currently streaming on Disney+), All That Breathes follows a pair of brothers in New Delhi who rescue and care for injured black kites, a bird of prey that’s struggling to survive in the city’s increasingly polluted skies. It’s the kind of gentle and quietly profound observational documentary that seems to bury its way into the heart of everybody who watches it – join them so you can say you’ve seen it when it ends up winning the Oscar.

From the Vault: Gigli (2003) (Netflix)

Critics are divided about this 2003 romantic crime comedy starring Ben Afflek and Jennifer Lopez – depending on who you listen to, it’s either the worst movie of the year, the worst movie of the decade or the worst movie of all time. Affleck plays a low-ranking LA mobster, Lopez is the minder hired because his boss doesn’t trust him to do his job properly. The chemistry is reportedly “non-existent”, which is funny because the pair were dating at the time. So is Gigli (pronounced “jee-lee”) really as bad as its 6 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes suggests? You know you want to watch and decide for yourself.

Podcast of the Week: The Coldest Case in Laramie

The latest podcast from the Serial Productions team starts out sounding a bit like a parody of a true-crime podcast: there’s the plinky-plonky background music, then the flat, serious journalist monotone of New York Times reporter Kim Barker arrives to paint a picture of a small town in Wyoming, where early one morning in 1985 a young woman was brutally murdered. It’s like a podcast a movie character who’s obsessed with true-crime podcasts might listen to. But bear with it. The eight-part series gets really good in episode three, when Barker arrives in her old hometown of Laramie – she was in high school when the murder shocked the town – and starts talking to people involved in the case. The arrested man’s defence attorney, a character straight out of Better Call Saul, hands over a mountain of evidence, and the remaining episodes combine the original police interview tapes with current-day interviews, showing how much the memory can warp in cases like this. It’s a no-frills production – the episodes don’t even attempt to land on a cliffhanger and the series doesn’t attempt to arrive at a tidy “case closed” resolution. The fact that it keeps you hooked regardless should tell you everything you need to know.