Serial success

HE wooed Anne Hathaway’s character in The Devil Wears Prada on the big screen before starring in The Mentalist, one of the successful exports to come out of the US in recent years.

The second series of the crime drama finds him back as the phoney psychicturned detective, Patrick Jane.

Unsurprisingly, Australian-born Simon Baker is having the time of his life playing the sleuth and thinks the show’s procedural style is the main reason why it has become a runaway success.

“The Mentalist fulfils when it has to deliver to an audience that wants a beginning, a middle and an end,” he says..

“In a way, I think that’s why procedural shows are having a little bit of a heyday at the moment. I think people like the idea of sitting down to watch an hour of television and getting that closure.”

The Mentalist was only the second show in TV history to become America’s most-watched show of the week during its first series.

The latest offering involves a murder case at a cemetery in the middle of the night. The victim is Dr Towlen Morning, family physician to a couple murdered by serial killer Red John some years ago.

When Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney) and the team return to headquarters, they find Bosco (Terry Kinney) and two of his agents gunned down in their office.

Jane is convinced that the two cases are linked. The plot thickens when a search of Dr Morning’s surgery unearths a dead Agent Hicks – with Red John’s signature smiley face painted on the wall in blood.

The doctor was involved in the Red John investigation nine years previously when two of his patients, Janet and Carter Peak, were murdered. Though Carter’s body was never found, it was assumed that he was the serial killer’s fourth victim.

With this complex case starting to take shape, Jane and the rest of the team are surprised to learn that Red John had an accomplice in the office, so Jane wastes no time in interrogating the potential suspects in the hope of uncovering another lead.

Can Jane discover the identity of Red John, or will the serial killer slip through his grasp once again?

LAST year’s London Marathon saw 36,000 participants sweating and panting their way to raising a grand total of £47m, and ensured its place as the biggest one-day fundraising event in the world. So expectations are high as this year’s marathon is only a few weeks away.

Enter journalist Ben Laurance, who wants to know just what happens to all the money made in the event. In the Dispatches programme, he starts off by looking at how much it costs to stage the annual event, how much it generates and the extent of the proceeds received by charities.

In the course of his investigation, he discovers who the lucky recipients of some of the money are and talks to leading charities about the sums they pay to take part.

He also examines just how tough it is to get an entry in the race, and asks why hundreds of charities are left without a place in the fundraising event.

THE names Frederick Austerlitz and Virginia Katherine McMath probably won’t mean much to anyone, but once the former adopted the name Fred Astaire, the skilled dancer from Nebraska started out on the road to fame and fortune.

Ms McMath swapped her moniker to Ginger Rogers and the rest, as they say, is history. They made ten films together, including Top Hat, Swing Time and Shall We Dance, which helped cement their reputation as Hollywood legends.

In Astaire and Rogers Sing the Great American Songbook, the pair perform hits written by acclaimed American songwriters, including George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.