Television: today's pick
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Your support makes all the difference.Men Behaving Badly (9.30pm BBC1) Ah, yes, the series too far. It happens to most great sitcoms. It happened to Absolutely Fabulous, it happened to Roseanne and, if you listen to some commentators (I don't exactly agree), it's happening at present to Friends. It's too early to say whether the sixth series of Men Behaving Badly is the one too far, but it begins rustily - and the gags, worn thin, seem to be running on automatic pilot. The main problem, though, is that Martin Clunes, Caroline Quentin, Neil Morrissey and Leslie Ash are beginning, just, to be too old for the roles - people in early middle age impersonating characters in their late twenties. That said, writer Simon Nye has moved them on - Gary and Dorothy towards marriage (Gary thinks buying a dog is an easier option), and Tony and Deborah towards a proper relationship.
10 X 10: Remembering Sister Ruth (10.15pm BBC2) The moment in Black Narcissus when Kathleen Byron's crazed Sister Ruth emerges from the convent doorway to try and push Deborah Kerr down the mountainside is one of the most truly startling in the movies. Those eyes! Malcolm Venville's nifty short film catches up with Byron, whose career subsequently took a wrong turn into B-movie semi-oblivion.
THe film
Ring of Spies (1.50pm C4) At about the same time that Bernard Lee was embarking on his lucrative second career as "M" in the Bond movies, he headlined in this Frank Launder-scripted drama based on the real-life exploits of the so-called Portland spy ring. Lee plays Henry Houghton, the records clerk at the Royal Navy Underwater Operations Establishment who was blackmailed into spying for the Russians from a suburban semi. The American actor William Sylvester plays Lee's spymaster.
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