Garden Hustle loses the plot

Hosted by Lisa McCune and landscaping business owner Dave Franklin, The Garden Hustle is a Backyard Blitz-type of show, where a family is given a weekend to make their dreams of a perfect backyard come to life.

The problem is the show clearly doesn't think the challenges facing the family are good enough to be the focal point of the show.

This episode also spends a huge chunk of time following the efforts of school employees who are building a sensory garden.

It ends up being quite confusing; we've just been introduced to the family and shown what they want to do in their backyard and then they disappear for about a quarter of the show.

Then there's also a segment where someone talks about pot plants. At least I think that's what it was about; to be honest I'd stopped caring by that time.

Then we finally go back to the family and their backyard battle. But guess what? We've seen so little of them throughout the show that we frankly don't care whether or not they finish their garden makeover in time (spoiler alert: they finish it in time. Of course, they do. They always finish in time on these shows).

I'm really scratching my head as to why anyone thought this show deserved a Sunday, 7.30pm timeslot. It really should be something that airs at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon, when no-one is watching.

Watching this final episode of a three-part doco detailing the 2021 British military's efforts to evacuate people from Afghanistan before the Taliban took over again was a mistake.

That's because it made me realise I'd missed the first two episodes of a very well-made and heartbreaking story.

The Brits were there to get 5000 British nationals and 8000 Afghans on planes and out of the country.

As well as footage shot by news cameras and the military itself, the story is told by those soldiers who were on the ground experiencing the tragedy first-hand.

The stories they tell and the effect their experiences had on them is at times painful to watch.

In the 1980s these three guys were songwriting legends - or villains - take your pick.

The trio got together and created a hit factory where they wrote one top 10 song after another. They were responsible for hits by Dead or Alive, Rick Astley, Mel and Kim, Bananarama, Kylie Minogue and loads of others.

Quickly, they were pilloried as creating assembly line pop songs, while those critics completely missed one very relevant point.

If what Stock Aitken and Waterman were doing was so easy, then why couldn't anyone else do it?

The answer is that they couldn't do it. The ability to crank out hit after hit after hit is nothing to take lightly or mock.

This is the first in a two-part documentary series, which explains why Kylie doesn't appear until the very end - her story is presumably told in more detail in the second episode.