HD Heads-Up: August 22-28

TV1’s struggling Wednesday line-up will get a makeover with a new Rachel Hunter vehicle and an Australian version of Benefits Street.

Rachel Hunter’s Tour of Beauty will replace the low-rating Gadget Man as Fair Go’s lead-out on August 26 while Struggle Street will take over from the sublime but neglected This Town at 8.30.

Imagination TV (House House, MasterChef NZ) bills Hunter’s show as “a global odyssey to find the key to superior well-being, great health and age-defying looks” — which the Daily Mail reckons the star personified while on location in Cannes.

It will be a sharp segue from supermodel globetrotting to making ends meet on Struggle Street.

It’s a three-part series set in Western Sydney where the hard-up residents proudly see themselves as “Aussie battlers”.

“Poverty porn, it is thankfully not,” The Guardian said of the SBS commission. “This first episode proves important television, if flawed by stock writing and undersold by sensational marketing.”

The Australian agreed: “The show is a credible, verite look at social inequality that has been sold as a titillating, even sneering piece of ‘look-at-them’ poverty porn.”

“What we saw was a complex and nuanced look at how some people fall through the cracks,” said the Sydney Morning Herald.

“And how damn hard it is to climb back up when you don’t have the money, family, friends or education most of us take for granted.”

Critics were less impressed with Channel 4’s Strippers (TV1, 11.10 Thursdays from August 27).

The Guardian said the three Scottish lap dancers interviewed in the premiere were “lively, articulate, charismatic and entirely ill-served by the programme, which, not content with stuffing itself full of shots of the women and their colleagues at work, also only ever interviewed them in their bras and knickers.

“Instead of embedding their world within a wider social and economic context to look at how genuinely free people are to make certain choices at certain times in their lives, or how representative these three were of dancers’ experience, the script was full of pusillanimous inanities and avoidance tactics such as ‘all types of women are attracted to stripping and they all have their own reasons for starting.'”

“Who’s exploiting who?” asked The Independent. “The number of strip clubs in Britain has doubled in a decade, so it’s a question worth asking, but asking it only of the people with the most motivation to self-delude isn’t particularly illuminating. Strippers might be better off talking to the owner of one of these lucrative business operations.”

Returning for new seasons are Topp Country (TV1, 8.00 Sunday) and Wentworth (TV2, 8.30 Monday) while ending their runs are Tabatha Takes Over and Take Me Out.

The week’s only network movie premieres — TV2’s We’re the Millers and TV3’s About Time — will go head-to-head on Sunday night opposite TV1’s Sunday Theatre dramatisation, Venus and Mars. The rest of the week’s coming attractions in HD are limited to Daddy Day Care (TV2, 7.00 Saturday), Zack and Miri Make a Porno (TV2, 8.50 Saturday), Side Effects (TV2, 10.40 Sunday) and Cowboys & Aliens (TV3, 8.40 Wednesday).