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Sunday
Black Narcissus BBC ONE, 9PM
PICK OF THE WEEK
It takes real nerve to approach a film as adored and pored-over as Powell and Pressburger's daring and arrestingly colourful adaptation of Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus. Thankfully, screenwriter Amanda Coe and director Charlotte Bruus Christensen prove well up to the task, using the three hours afforded them to dig deeper into issues of colonialism, faith and patriarchy. Gemma Arterton stars as Sister Clodagh, leading an expedition of nuns to establish a school in a palace in the high Himalayas, in spite of local uninterest and the scepticism of expat planter Mr Dean (Alessandro Nivola). Gradually, the nuns - Aisling Franciosi's fragile Ruth and Rosie Cavaliero's redoubtable Briony among them - are infected by their curious surroundings, and haunted by their memories and the ghosts of past tragedies within the Palace. The fallout is as spectacular as the Nepalese backdrops, with minds and morals unravelling over the next three nights. Gabriel Tate Last Woman on Earth with Sara Pascoe BBC TWO, 9PM
A neat gimmick for another celebrity travelogue, in which comedian Sara Pascoe tries her hand at the world's "most endangered" jobs, beginning in Cuba. She is endearingly hopeless at most of them, from a cigar-factory storyteller to sweetmaker, but that's hardly the point; at heart she is an interested tourist asking sensible questions. Next week: guns and singing in Georgia. GT
Monday Meerkat: A Dynasties Special
BBC ONE, 7.30PM "They may be small but together they are strong," is the seasonal bonding message of this super-cute but, in parts, quite gritty documentary about a family of meerkats struggling to survive.
Narrated by Sir David Attenborough, it follows the efforts of Maghogho, a young female, to establish a new meerkat dynasty...