Prime Time revisits missing person cases; Idris Elba is the unlikely star of a new sitcom; and Trevor MacDonald remembers Martin Luther King - here's your TV highlights for Thursday
Missing: A Prime Time Rewind, RTÉ One, 10.15pm
Missing: A Prime Time Rewind is another chance to re-visit four significant missing person reports that were previously broadcast on RTÉ’s Prime Time. Reporter Barry Cummins, details the circumstances and subsequent investigations into missing persons in different parts of the country over the last 40 years. The disappearance of Mary Boyle features in a special report which included new images and interviews with her family in April 2017 marking 40 years since she went missing.
Mary had followed her uncle Gerry Gallagher when he was delivering a ladder back to a neighbour's house, which was 400 yards away on a hillside. The last reported sighting of Mary was by her uncle that afternoon as she turned back towards her grandparent's home just over halfway on the journey to the neighbour’s house. Gerry continued on to the neighbour’s home and returned the ladder.
Mary‘s mother Ann told RTE Prime Time she believed Mary did make it to a nearby road on the day she vanished.
In The Long Run, Sky One and NOW TV, 10.00pm
Step back to the 80s with a double bill of this new comedy, a Sky Original Production created by and featuring Idris Elba. Loosely based on Elba’s childhood, it’s set amid the tower blocks (and shell-suits) of 1980s London. There, life is going well for Walter (Elba), his wife Agnes (Madeline Appiah) and their 13-year-old British-born son Kobna (Sammy Kamara). Well, apart from the fact their upstairs neighbour Bagpipes’s (Bill Bailey) bathroom is leaking into their flat, that is. Agnes sells make-up door to door, Kobna and his best mate Dean are just about managing to dodge the local thugs and Walter’s making enough money at the factory to get by, and send a little back to Sierra Leone. Their life is all about routine but everything is about to change when Walter’s charismatic, freewheeling brother (Jimmy Akingbola) crashes into their quiet lives.
Trevor McDonald on Martin Luther King, TV3, 10.00pm
If there is one man Sir Trevor McDonald could have met but didn’t, it’s Martin Luther King. As we approach the 50th anniversary of MLK's death, this documentary follows Trevor as he travels to the deep south of America to try and get closer to the man who meant so much to him and so many others. McDonald uncovers new sides to the story. He discovers the words "I Have A Dream" were off the cuff, never intended to be in that famous speech. He meets a former member the Ku Klux Klan who confesses that in a different life he would have targeted McDonald because of the colour of his skin. McDonald also interviews an expert on the horrors of lynching in 20th century America, and asks Naomi Campbell, General Colin Powell and the Reverend Al Sharpton what Martin Luther King means to them.
Full TV listings here.
