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Sydney Morning Herald

Monday October 26, 2009

Brad Newsome

Taboo: Extreme PunishmentsNational Geographic, 9.30pmAlthough this series ran out of real taboos long ago it continues to find amazing stories. Tonight's most fascinating yarn comes from Albania, where the collapse of the communist regime in the 1990s led to the re-emergence of the murderous blood-feud culture of centuries past. As many as 1000 children are prisoners in their own homes because they've been marked for death by their parents' enemies. We meet 17-year-old Christian whose father is in jail for murder. The murdered man's brother has sworn to kill Christian in revenge and he hasn't left his house since he was three. The doco follows the efforts of a feud negotiator to sort things out.SportStar InsiderDiscovery, 8.30pmAndrew Ettingshausen is an engaging host in this new series about developments in high-performance and extreme sports. Tonight he teams up with Tom Carroll to look at a new kind of unbreakable surfboard, undergoes some breath-holding training with a champion free diver and meets Olympian Felicity Galvez to learn about high-tech swim suits.Ultimate GamerFox8, 7.35pmThe surprising thing about this series is not that video games can be a reasonably good spectator sport but the amount of interpersonal drama going on. The young gamers inhabiting the Ultimate Gamer house seem to care more about each other than about winning the competition. 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 game of hide and seek. Tonight's game is Virtua Fighter 5.