Match of the Day Live
BBC One, 7.30pm
Wembley says ciao to Fabio Capello as he takes charge of England for the first time. It’s only a friendly against Switzerland, but anything less than a win will sink the English team further into its Great Depression.
Torchwood
BBC Two, 9pm
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Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall have both attacked the foul conditions under which battery chickens are reared. Tonight’s Torchwood takes the television campaign against intensive farming farther still. A lorry involved in a crash is found to be carrying great slabs of indeterminate, boneless meat. Traced to its source, the meat came from a vast extraterrestrial creature - like a huge beached whale - that had the misfortune to arrive in Cardiff through a rift in space and time. The animal, which is fully sentient, lies helplessly while slabs of its flesh are sliced off to be processed and packaged. “Imprisoned, chained and drugged,” says a disgusted Captain Jack. “Welcome to Planet Earth.”
Wonderland: The Madness of Dancing Daniel
BBC Two, 9.50pm
With any luck, this new Wonderland strand - an eclectic mix of observational documentaries that focuses on ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances - will become a regular part of the BBC’s output. Four programmes so far, and there hasn’t been a dud. Tonight’s episode follows Daniel, a 29-year-old who suffers from what is loosely described as a “personality disorder”, which seems to be a catch-all diagnosis for unmanageable and eccentric behaviour. (Daniel kept burning down his living quarters by drying clothes on top of the oven). In particular, it concentrates on his relationship with the saintly Professor Peter Tyrer, who is doing everything in his power to prevent Daniel from wasting years of his life on a long-term psychiatric ward.
Repossession, Repossession, Repossession
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ITV1, 10.35pm
Britain has been living on credit for ten years, but now the party is over. “I’ve been warning about the dangers of excessive debt for years,” says the economics correspondent Jeff Randall. “The day of reckoning has arrived.” It shows how the banks - and even the Government - have played their part in aiding and abetting a culture of debt.
ONE Life
BBC One, 10.40pm
The goalkeeper Harry Gregg was a hero of the Munich air crash that killed 23 of the 44 passengers on board BEA Flight 609, 50 years ago today. Eight of Manchester United’s legendary “Busby Babes” died; two more were so badly injured they never played football again. Because of slush on the runway, the aircraft made three attempts to take off. Having failed to gain enough height, it crashed into the fence around the airport. Gregg pulled survivors from the burning wreckage, despite being told repeatedly that the aircraft was about to blow up. In this powerful film, he revisits the scene of the crash for the first time since the disaster.