SNUGGLING down on the sofa with the family in front of the box is about the only thing you can do when the weather has been this bad, and one would imagine the local TV stations would jump at the chance to fill our screens with wholesome family classics like The Sound Of Music or ET. Instead, World has been showing a series of rather hard-core documentaries, including this week's repeat of the British Channel Four Dispatches programme called The Shame Of Cromwell Street (today, World, 3.05 pm). As all the world knows by now, Cromwell Street was the home of serial killer Fred West and his wife Rosemary.
The programme doesn't elaborate on the Wests' serial killings or twisted sexual debauchery, rather it concentrates on just how they managed to get away with what they did for so long. It is grim viewing; the endless false starts, the lack of co-operation between the authorities who could have saved all those young women, and a few unbearable interviews with friends and neighbours who now say they always knew dreadful things were going on. Required viewing, though not perhaps on a Sunday afternoon.
Last summer, there was a minor ruckus when Pearl screened, or rather repeated, Child's Play, the movie that was supposed to have been a favourite of two other British monsters, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the 10-year-olds who killed two-year-old Jamie Bulger in 1993. But concerned citizens need have nothing to fear, well not much anyway. World is showing a 1972 film of the same title starring Beau Bridges and James Mason (Wednesday, 12.55 am). This Child's Play is pretty sick too, with lots of shocking violence in a catholic boys' school, though it's nothing like as terrifying as what Chucky gets up to.
Swing Kids (Pearl, 9.30 pm) was a modest success when it came out in 1993, only to disappear and be relegated to midweek repeats on obscure English-language channels in Asia. It is a pity, as this film is based on an interesting idea and now has curio value as the movie that effectively marked the end of one actor's career and the beginning of another: out went Christian Bale (Empire Of The Sun) and in came Noah Wyle, who has since moved on to better things as ER's squeaky clean Dr Carter and now competes with George Clooney for fan mail. The story, set in the early 1940s, tells of two young Germans more interested in big band music than the Hitler Youth and details the various scraps their hobby lands them in. Wyle has a minor role here, while Kenneth Branagh gets to strut around as a horrid, uncool Nazi.
Other than that, the only really classy movie of the week is Howards End (Pearl, Friday, 9.30 pm), in which Branagh's ex-wife, Emma Thompson, won a Best Actress Oscar. She gives one of her best performances as Margaret, the woman who has to reconcile her Bohemian family with her husband's bourgeois kin. The love scenes with Anthony Hopkins, who can portray a man on the edge of a grande passion simply by narrowing his eyes, are electric.