Alone in the Wild
Channel 4, 9pm
In this new series, the gung-ho television producer Ed Wardle is dropped into the Yukon, in the west of Canada, to try to survive in the wilderness for 12 weeks entirely on his own. Although he has climbed Everest a couple of times and filmed an expedition to the North Pole, he’s not one of those survival experts who can rub sticks together, cook a spider casserole or fashion a tent from salmon skins. But he is an expert cameraman and will be filming everything himself. One of his biggest challenges is finding enough to eat while trying to avoid the 7,000 grizzlies and 10,000 black bears that wander up and down the Yukon looking for tasty cameramen. He will also have to cope with the solitude, because the nearest human being is more than ten miles away. Tonight’s episode is a gentle introduction to solitude in the wild. Thereafter, it starts to get a lot more tricky.
Watchdog
BBC One, 8pm
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Anne Robinson, the dominatrix of primetime TV, returns to present a new series of Watchdog after an eight-year absence. “My mission statement,” she says, “is to have all customers treated like royalty. Any chairman of a public company providing less-than-perfect service needs to fasten his or her seatbelt and adopt the brace position.” Among the regular features will be the undercover filming of rogue traders presented by Matt Allwright and, for the first time, there will be a studio audience on hand to raise questions of their own. There is no dearth of material for the team to choose from: they receive 7,000 e-mails and letters each week.
The Love of Money
BBC Two, 9pm
The Love of Money is the first of an engrossing three-part documentary series that tells the inside story of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The bank’s legendary chief executive, Dick Fuld, aka “the gorilla”, had been encouraging the bank’s investment officers to take on more and more risk in order to maximise profits. The share price had risen from $4 in 1994 to $82 in 2007. But when investors began to worry about the extent of the bank’s exposure to a falling property market, they dumped the shares and withheld credit. Tonight’s gripping episode describes the frantic attempts over one weekend to rescue the bank after the US Treasury refused public funds. It ended with the largest corporate bankruptcy in history — ten times bigger than the collapse of Enron.
Lunch Monkeys
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BBC Three, 10.30pm
One of the best things about this new comedy series is that it doesn’t have an idiot laughter track. Nor is it recorded in front of an audience, which is another trick that producers use to generate artificial hype. Lunch Monkeys takes place in the postroom of a personal-injury law firm, which offers a kind of sanctuary for school leavers, oddballs and assorted misfits. They are demented with boredom and spend all day behaving like unruly fifth formers, which places Nigel Havers — the firm’s senior partner — in the role of a headmaster. The writer David Isaac drew on his own experience working as a supervising solicitor in a Manchester law firm. It’s broad, good-humoured, knockabout comedy without a subtle bone in its body. Technically speaking, it is somewhere between painless and quite good fun.