Tuesday's best TV: Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema

Mark Kermode is that rarest of film critics.

He understands the genre, gets the references, has seen everything but also remembers to enjoy himself. It’s true that some of the pleasure in his radio reviews (with Simon Mayo on 5 Live) is rooted in his venomous destruction of terrible films — ie the majority of releases — but that’s Hollywood’s problem, not his. Plus, when Kermode is wrong, he admits it.

Witness his recent confession that he was too harsh on the first Incredibles film, and his warm embrace of the sequel.

Criticism works on radio because it is all about the voice. Television has less interest in criticism, and struggles with the appreciation of culture in general. Not just film, though there is a giant hole in the mainstream schedules for an intelligent film-review magazine.

Where, in the era of book clubs and giant literary festivals, is the books programme? There is so much culture spewing around, yet television is failing in its duty to educate and inform.

But let’s stick with film. Secrets of Cinema (9pm, BBC4) is not Kermode rating the new releases. Possibly it should be. He could do the Barry Norman thing in his sleep, with added exasperation. Rather, it is an attempt to understand film in all its forms; a more intensely focused version of Mark Cousins’ 2011 series The Story of Film: An Odyssey. (Cousins is another passionate cineaste who should be all over television but isn’t).

Kermode starts with the romcom. He claims to have seen the Daryl Hannah mermaid love story Splash 100 times, which is taking enthusiasm to the level of a medical condition. Still, let’s watch and learn. Ron Howard’s fishy tale includes a cinematic nod to Miranda, a British film from 1948, in which a mermaid ensnares a fisherman on the Cornish coast. Swimming forwards, Splash informs Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 Oscar-winner, The Shape Of Water, by merging it with The Creature From the Black Lagoon (Sally Hawkins is Tom Hanks, and the amphibian Doug Jones is Daryl Hannah).

Kermode wears a tightly fitted suit and Wayfarer specs. He looks like an undertaker, or a gangster, or the double-bass player in a prohibition-era boogie band. In other words, his erudition is disguised. But this is a lecture crammed with ideas. There are the rules of the romcom, stretching from the three-act formula to the “meet-cute”, in which polar opposites repel and attract, before falling for the happy ending in which the catch-light — a visible sparkle of attractiveness — will be evident in the gaze of the girl/fish/boy. (“No one’s eyes sparkle more than Meg Ryan’s,” says Kermode, inviting a challenge). There is The Obstacle, the GBF (gay best friend), the “manic pixie dream girl” and various twists on the formula to keep it freshly familiar.

Controversy? Kermode steps up to defend Love Actually, which isn’t a thing many critics are prepared to do, and he prefers the original ending of Pretty Woman, in which Julia Roberts goes to Disneyland with her sex-worker friend instead of hooking up with Richard Gere’s Edward (a horrible character, from a world of horrible people).

Still, the Gere part was originally designed for John Travolta, which might have foregrounded the contradictions of the romcom formula and revealed the film as a prostitute Pygmalion.

London Live

Diamond Geezers - London Live, 10pm

What an extreme stroke of luck that gangster geez Dodger (Mark Jackson) shares the same name as Los Angeles’s prominent baseball team, because that shared moniker is bound to help him blend in when he’s sent there to retrieve his errant sister.

If he’d been called the Toronto Blue Jays he’d really have stood out. Missing cash and a missing sister are what Dodger has to escort back home, though local muscle isn’t so keen to see him leave unfinished business behind…

Age of Kill - London Live, 11.35pm

There you are, with your trotters up enjoying retirement, and then your daughter upsets the daily routine of Homes Under the Hammer by allowing herself to be kidnapped. Kids, eh?

Former secret service sniper Sam Blake (Martin Kemp) is forced to pick up his old telescopic sight when the kidnapper calls and demands lives in return for his daughter’s safety. Six targets, scattered across London, are to be murdered by Blake in six hours or less in this ruthless thriller with a decent set of co-stars including Phil Davis, Dexter Fletcher and Nick Moran as a nasty far-Right demagogue.