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

Selin Hizli left and Daisy May Cooper in Am I Being Unreasonable? Photo / James Pardon/BBC Studios/Boffola Pictures

Am I Being Unreasonable? (TVNZ+)

The life of the stay-at-home parent can seem like the dream when you go to work at an office every day, but Daisy May Cooper paints a slightly different picture in the BBC comedy-thriller Am I Being Unreasonable? First her character Nic has to pry herself off the couch and away from Real Housewives because her son’s on at her about not wanting to be “late for school”. Then an imperceptibly minor run-in with one of the alpha mums gives her something to stew over all day. The cleaner’s in, so she has to finish her Real Housewives ep on her phone in the cemetery. And she can’t stop having flashbacks to the horrific train accident that killed the man she was having an affair with right before her eyes. She tells the story of that affair to a new mum at the school, Jen (Selin Hizili, Cooper’s real-life best friend and it shows), over a quiet wine, which turns into a bottle of wine which turns into vodka and the pair screaming with laughter quoting “what a sad little life Jane” at each other. What Nic doesn’t notice is the phone propped up against Jen’s knee, recording the whole story. A comedy-thriller can be a hard balance to strike, and there are times during the six-episode series you wish it would just choose one or the other – some moments in later episodes are so riotously funny that you wonder why couldn’t the whole thing be like this. But the thriller elements – why is Jen covertly filming Nic, for a start – are ultimately what makes this the kind of series you can easily watch in one go, and three hours well spent at that.

A Spy Among Friends. Photo / Supplied

A Spy Among Friends (TVNZ+)

It’s a big year for dramatic adaptations of Ben McIntyre’s military history books – first, the stranger-than-fiction Operation Mincemeat was turned into a film starring Colin Firth, then SAS Rogue Heroes was made into a series by the folks who made Peaky Blinders. Now completing the trifecta, A Spy Among Friends tells the story of Kim Philby, an MI6 intelligence officer who in the 1960s was revealed to have been secretly working as a double agent for the KGB and spilling top secret British tea to the Soviets. Guy Pearce plays Philby, with Damian Lewis as his MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliott.

Irreverent. Photo / Netflix

Irreverent (Netflix)

If you were wondering if the way Americans view Australia had changed much since The Simpsons paid the country a visit in the 1990s, the opening scene of Irreverent holds the answer. The reverend of a tropical North Queensland town is eaten by a crocodile (“that’s the third one this year”), creating a vacancy that is filled by a Chicago criminal forced into hiding on the other side of the world after a heist gone wrong. After stealing the identity of the actual reverend, he finds himself in the town of Clump, which is filled with the type of oddball Aussie characters who wouldn’t have been out of place in Priscilla.

Three Pines. Photo / Prime Video

Three Pines (Prime Video)

If you aren’t familiar with Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache novels, the first episode of Three Pines is a little confusing. It starts with Armand Gamache (Alfred Molina) looking into the disappearance of Blue Two Rivers, one of many young indigenous women who’ve gone missing and the police don’t want to know about. Next thing you know he’s in a quirky snowglobe town in rural Quebec investigating a Brokenwood-worthy case of a prominent local identity electrocuted during a charity curling match. Stick with it though and it’s an above-average detective show – a series of classic two-episode cases, with the mystery of Blue Two Rivers weaving through all of them.

Movie of the Week: Pinocchio (Netflix)

Confusingly this is the second Pinocchio movie of 2022, after a live-action version starring Tom Hanks came out on Disney+ in September. That one got a fairly lukewarm reception from critics, but this one – a stop-motion version directed by Mexican master Guillermo del Toro – appears to be the real deal. David Bradley (Hogwarts caretaker Flitch) voices the heartbroken woodworker Geppetto, Ewan McGregor narrates the story as Sebastian J. Cricket and Tilda Swinton is of course a Wood Sprite. There hasn’t been this much hype surrounding a stop-motion since Michel Gondry made a music video for Steriogram.

From the Vault: Offspring (2010) (TVNZ+)

If you ever see an Australian actor pop up in something and wonder what you recognise them from, the answer is probably Offspring. The beloved comedy-drama about the chaotic work and love lives of obstetrician Nina Proudman (Asher Keddie) and her friends and family was grade-A Sunday night comfort viewing for much of the 2010s – now it’s back on TVNZ+ in bingeable box set format right in time for the holidays.

Podcast of the Week: Dead Competitive

Just days after placing second in his category at the 2015 Crufts dog show, an Irish Setter called Thendara Satisfaction (“Jagger” to his owners) died suddenly at his home in Belgium. A post-mortem found cubes of meat laced with poison in the award-winning dog’s stomach. And according to the owners, the only time he could have been fed this poisoned meat was during the brief window he was out of their sight during judging at Crufts. These are the headline facts of Dead Competitive, a canine true crime podcast from the BBC. Nobody ever figured out how or by whom Jagger was poisoned, so now comedian Kerry Godliman has picked up the case. Usually a comedian hosting a true crime podcast (even if the victim is a dog) would be a big red flag, but here it’s the right call. The mystery of Jagger’s poisoning is just a starting point for a wild journey into the weird world of pedigree dog breeding and showing, and it takes a comedian to do justice to the absurdity of this real-life Best In Show community. Jagger’s demise, she soon finds out, is far from the only strange story to have come out of the extremely competitive dog show circuit.