Prince: A Purple Reign
BBC4, 9pm
This opens at the beginning, in December 1979 with Prince’s first appearance on television. Farah Fawcett hair, Jimmy Savile trousers, and the most terrible case of stage fright you’ve ever seen.
The presenter asks him a question and Prince just looks at the floor and squirms. “That will never happen again,” he said afterwards. And he was right, the boy with stage fright became the opposite: a strutting, stomping star who was not only a synthesis of all the black music that had gone before him, but a celebration of it too.
This profile includes contributions from friends and colleagues who try to understand his appeal. “When you listen to him,” says one, “you just have lift-off.”
From Around The World In A Day to Sign O’ The Times and experiments with hip-hop and jazz, the programme also looks at how Prince became a global sensation and how he not only revolutionised black music, but revolutionised the perception of it with worldwide hits such as 1999 and Kiss. Eventually, he became a global sensation with the Oscar-winning movie Purple Rain in 1984, which told the story of his young life.
There have been controversies and those who have been turned off by what can look like studied eccentricity, but Prince remains one of most ambitious and prolific songwriters of his generation, an artist who tested the boundaries of taste and decency with explicit sexual lyrics and stage shows and in the 1990s fought for ownership of his name and control of his music.
Poirot
ITV3, 7.55pm
David Suchet has announced he will record new Poirots, making him the only actor to play the detective in every one of Agatha Christie’s stories.
It is good news, unlike ITV’s latest versions of the Marple stories, this is Christie’s character all cool, clever, distant, serious, moral, intolerant and fair.
Tonight, Poirot bets Japp he can solve a case without leaving his flat.
Murder By Decree
ITV3, 11.05pm
Anthony Horowitz’s novel The House Of Silk isn’t a revival of Sherlock Holmes; thanks to films like this, Holmes has never been in need of reviving. Christopher Plummer is far from the perfect Holmes but the production of this story of the detective pursuing Jack the Ripper is moist with atmosphere, and the look, the sound and the performances of Donald Sutherland and John Geilguid are very fruity and pleasing.
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