Pay TV - Thursday, October 29

The Age

Thursday October 22, 2009

brad newsome

Taboo: Extreme PunishmentNational Geographic, 9.30pmTABOO should just let the whole "taboo" thing go. Although it ran out of real taboos long ago, it continues to find amazing stories that stand up perfectly well on their own. Calling each and every one of them "taboo" is just silly. Anyway, tonight's most fascinating yarn comes from Albania, where the collapse of the authoritarian communist regime in the 1990s led to the re-emergence of the murderous blood-feud culture of centuries past. Thousands of Albanians have since been killed in blood feuds and today as many as 1000 children are prisoners in their own homes because they've been marked for death by their parents' enemies. The documentary introduces us to 17-year-old Christian, who has been unable to set foot outside his family's home since he was three years old. His father is in jail for murder but the murdered man's brother has sworn to kill the boy to avenge the death. The documentary follows the efforts of a feud negotiator to sort things out and bring peace to the warring parties. Elsewhere, we see an open prison in India that lets murderers have day jobs; and American judges who sentence offenders to walk the streets carrying signs that detail their crimes.SportStar InsiderDiscovery, 8.30pmRUGBY league champ Andrew Ettingshausen (pictured) is an enthusiastic host in this new series about developments in high-performance and extreme sports. Tonight, he teams up with surfing legend Tom Carroll to look at a new kind of unbreakable surfboard. He then undergoes some breath-holding training with a champion free diver. Later, he meets with Olympic gold medallist Felicity Galvez to learn about high-tech swim suits and see how underwater cameras help swimmers perfect their techniques.The Ultimate GamerFox8, 7.35pmTHE surprising thing about this series is not that video games can be a reasonably good spectator sport (well, depending on the game) but the amount of interpersonal drama and Survivor-style alliance intrigue that is going on. All reality shows have their rivalries and backstabbing but the hip and/or nerdy young gamers inhabiting The Ultimate Gamer house often seem to care more about each other than winning. The one man on the outer this week is Dante, who has a hair-trigger dummy-spit reflex �� he even goes into a sulk after he gets found in a friendly game of hide and seek. Tonight's game is Virtua Fighter 5.Worth a lookTrue Horror: Frankenstein (BBC HD, 8.30pm)Ross Kemp: Afghanistan (History Channel, 9.30pm)RocKwiz (VH1, 9.30pm)