A tortured genius, a celebrity recluse, and antagonistic beyond belief – love him or loathe him, there were few chess champions as entertaining as America’s Bobby Fischer, whose 1972 defeat of Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky in Reykjavík captured the imagination of the entire world – not bad for something played on a small board with inanimate objects.
The documentary Bobby Fischer against the World (DR2, Tue 21:00) provides no new revelations for those knowledgeable about the chess player to enjoy, but for the uninitiated, it’s a fascinating tale of one of the game’s finest ever players, who poignantly in 2008 died in Reykjavík, the scene of his greatest triumph, aged 64 – one year for every square of the chess board.
The revelations in Panorama’s Murdoch’s TV Pirates (BBC World, Sun 22:30) will be thin on the ground as well – or at least in terms of information that might shock you post-Milly Dowling. Phone hacking, bin rummaging and honey-traps – all so the nation could vegetate on their way to work without ever finding out where Darfur is.
A bit like the characters in GCB. With a passable 56 rating on Metacritic, it’s about a former high school queen bitch, now widowed and returning to her teenage environment in her 30s.
Elsewhere, donate cash to British charity show Sport Relief (BBC Ent, Sun 18:00); catch again the first episodes of British crime series Death in Paradise (SV1, Sat 21:30) and The Shadow Line (SV2, Fri 22:15), US legal drama Suits (SV1, Sat 22:30) and the second season of Downtown Abbey (DR1, Sun 19:50); the Guardian found The Private life of Pigs (DR2, Sun 21:30) “hilariously gross viewing” thanks to its airing of “the world’s longest ejaculation”; after a strong first series, the second season of Eastbound and Down (SV2, Mon 22:45) is merely gross viewing; and among the films this week are the bland Ripley Under Ground (SV1, Tue 23:40), the in-jokey, blokey The Expendables (SV4, Sun 21:00), the laughable but timely 2012, the promising but ultimately disappointing What doesn’t kill you (DR HD, Sat 23:55) and the mystifyingly bad Echelon Conspiracy (DR HD, Thu 21:10).
