Prachi is an Indian tomboy who attends a camp for young militant Hindu females. The sari-clad tigress thanks her father for not having her aborted and hates Gandhi. Meanwhile, Shweta is a beauty queen who wants to get her claws into Bollywood, or maybe just a rich husband.
With behind-closed-doors access to their worlds, Nisha Pahuja’s award-winning doc The World Before Her (SV1, Tue 22.30) offers some predictable “bluntly ironic contrasts”, concludes Hollywood Reporter.
However, it was also impressed by how Pahuja pulled off the “tricky feat of providing intelligent and illuminating commentary on such a vast, sprawling subject as India within an accessible 90-minute package”.
The contrasts of Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream (DR2, Tue 20:30), the latest doc from Alex Gibney, are also obvious, but he does it sublimely well, comparing two New York streets with the same name. One houses the country’s largest concentration of billionaires while the other, five miles away from Manhattan in The Bronx, is the US’s poorest area.
The doc is one of several being screened as part of the Why Poverty? series, which is being shown in 180 countries worldwide. Another of them, Give us the money (DR1, Thu 23:00), grills Bono and Bob Geldof about whether charities like Live Aid has helped or hindered Africa’s poor.
Elsewhere, the Guardian felt the BBC doc The Crusades (DRK, Sat 20:00, Tue 18:10) was “storytelling of the highest quality”; A Lion called Christian (DR2, Thu 19:15) is like Born Free, but initially set on the King’s Road before moving to Kenya; The Real Sleeping Beauty (K4, Sat 19:45) is a BBC doc about a 16-year-old who can sleep for ten days at a time – sounds like a normal British teenager; while you owe him everything, we suspect you won’t get through ten minutes of Steve Jobs: iChanged the World (SV2, Mon 18:00) without reaching for your smartphone; and only watch Susan Boyle: An Unlikely Superstar (SV2, Tue 18:00) unless you want to feel like a hypocrite for deploring the lookist music industry and hating Susan for being so ugly.
