By Debi Enker
Blue Water Empire
ABC, Tuesday 8.30pm
Historical re-enactments can be unbearably naff but Aunty's three-part excursion into the history, culture and headhunting – repeat, headhunting – of the Torres Strait Islands manages to be captivatingly good. Maybe it's the subject matter, which ranges from the bloodthirsty days of tribe preying upon tribe through to the pearl fishing boom and the modern era's struggle for land and sea rights; maybe it's the full-throated pride of host and narrator Aaron Fa'Aoso, who tells the story of the Melanesian people of the Torres Strait's 200-plus islands with the help of animation, archival material and actors including Damian Walshe-Howling, Roy Billing, Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, Peter Phelps, Merwez Whaleboat and Robert Mammone. But naff this is not; instead, it's a long-overdue look at a part of Australia that few mainlanders are aware of.
Todd Sampson joins medics to treat the wounded in Gaza in tonight's episode of BodyHack.Credit: NETWORK TEN
The Inbestigators
ABC Me, 5pm
Blue Water Empire.Credit: ABC
Kid detectives. Little else needs to be said about the ABC's new excursion into children's entertainment except that it was made by the same folks behind Little Lunch (yay!). Oh, and that it features a cast of plucky Grade Five youngsters solving schoolyard mysteries. Perky, knowing and full of non-annoying child actors, it's a bite-sized 16-minute treat to assuage the 5pm blues.
BodyHack
Ten, 8.40pm
So maybe it doesn't pay to analyse BodyHack too deeply other than to accept its broad brief that it explores how human beings have adapted to extreme physical challenges. Freedive fishing with the Bajau people? Yes, OK. Breaking wooden poles with Chinese kung fu masters? Sure, no harm done. Ostensibly a science documentary, BodyHack strays into more tenuous territory in its series return this week when Todd Sampson visits Gaza to join the medics scooping protesters off the field in the mass Friday demonstrations that have seen hundreds killed and many thousands injured in the past year, and in the process turning a complex and tragic geopolitical hotspot into a platform for his cheesy brand of popular science. Sampson tries valiantly to bring the distressing footage back to the level of scientific inquiry – "How have the locals adapted to this confined environment?" is one of the more toe-curlingly clueless lines – before abandoning it in favour of something that might have migrated over from 60 Minutes. Gaza is a subject that deserves the world's attention; hammered into this contorted framework, however, it becomes as much about a terrorised Australian in a scary place as it is about the people who live in this open-air prison.