Top 10 TV picks: October 20-26

SMART SATIRE: Jacqui Brown returns to play a version of herself in The Jacqui Brown Diaries.

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Television critic Philip Wakefield chooses the best shows on the box this week, for Tuesday, October 20 to Monday, Ocotber 26.

1. Inside NZ: Charlotte: A Life Without Limbs: The only strand dedicated to Kiwi docos returns with a heartbreaking profile of a five-year-old who survived meningitis to become the country’s youngest quadruple amputee.
TV3, 9.30pm Wednesday

2. Sunday Theatre: The Tudors: Season three, which screens in double-episodes and recruits Max von Sydow as Cardinal Von Walburg, burdens Henry VIII with a whiff of madness.
TV One, 8.30pm Sunday

3. Heston’s Feast: Fat Duck chef Heston Blumenthal recreates menus from hundreds of years ago, ranging from Henry VIII’s Feast of Beasts to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, in a new series that The Independent quipped leaves “a mad taste in the mouth”.
TV One, 10.30pm Sunday

4. The Hunter: New series spun off the abduction drama, Five Days, which originally aired on TV3. In the premiere, anti-abortionists threaten to kill children they kidnap. Hugh Bonneville and Janet McTeer star.
TV One, 8.30pm Monday

5. Inside the Actor’s Studio: Two-hour special that aired four years ago in the United States, on the eve of the series finale of Everybody Loves Raymond, which it celebrates by interviewing the cast and creator Phil Rosenthal.
Arts Channel, 8.30pm Thursday

6. The Boy Who Can Never Grow: Meet the 19-year-old with a rare muscular disease who needs 24-hour care and has to deal death being imminent.
TV One, 11.35pm Sunday

7. The Jacquie Brown Diaries: The second season of this award-winning comedy opens with the disgraced celebrity slumming it on K Road - and on a midday radio show with James Coleman.
TV3, 9.35pm Friday

8. Can Fat Teens Hunt? As The Guardian observed of this reality newcomer about the survival of the fattest in the Borneo jungle: "Sometimes there is a title so brilliantly appalling, or appallingly brilliant, that it exerts a hypnotic fascination."
Prime, 7.30pm Wednesday

9. PAs: Premiere of a Scottish cross between Desperate Housewives and Ally McBeal that aired as Personal Affairs in the United Kingdom. Worth a look just to see if it’s as bad as most reviewers claimed (the exception being the Daily Express, which thought it a "zingy, playful drama").
UKTV, 8.30pm Thursday

10. Minder: As a British critic said of this next-generation take on the ‘80s hit: "It does feel a bit like sitting on flat-pack furniture after you've grown used to a Chesterfield." 
UK TV, 7.30pm Tuesday

- © Fairfax NZ News

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