Twenty Twelve
BBC Four 10pm
Twenty Twelve is a mock-documentary written by John Morton (People Like Us), which affectionately mocks the organisers of the Olympic Games. Only the British could delight in winning the bid and then delighting even more in lampooning their incompetence. Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville plays the semi-sane Head of Deliverance, who pedals around London on a bicycle looking deeply silly and struggling to inject common sense into his organisation. He is not helped by having Jessica Hynes on his team as an unspeakable PR woman who babbles in jargon, or Karl Theobald as the magnificently sanguine and inept nerd in charge of transport and traffic. Like a latter-day version of Dad’s Army, it is all gloriously recognisable.
Secret War on Terror
BBC Two, 9pm
Following his superb series on the Age of Terror, the journalist Peter Taylor examines the intelligence war that has been waged on al-Qaeda in the decade since 9/11. Underlying the series are two crucial questions: “Are we winning?” and “Are we now safer from attack?” The first programme shows how increasingly harsh interrogation techniques (including waterboarding and confinement in a “dog box”) were introduced to prevent a second wave of attacks, and it includes interviews with two FBI agents who conducted the first interrogation of a “high-value detainee”. It also contains fresh allegations of torture and British complicity in torture and new information that suggests more could have been done to prevent the London bombings.
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The Event
Channel 4, 10pm/11.05pm
Why slot a mid-season break into a show such as The Event? With its incredibly complex plotting, hyperactive time travel and itinerant scene-setting, it was hard enough to follow at the best of times. But now, four months later, does anyone remember where we actually left things? The aliens were trying to build a portal to their world and President Martinez discovered a secret launch site near China, while also trying to avoid being exposed for his part in the cover-up of the Inostranka internment camp. With the aliens falling out faster than ever, the rogue alien Thomas launched a satellite sending some kind of message home. Tonight, Martinez and his chief of staff charge the intelligence community with decrypting Thomas’s message.