Despite now being clean, sober and married, Charlie Sheen is an actor still living down his reputation as a womanising party boy. But in the new sitcom Two and a Half Men (Sun, Five, 8.30pm; below) he trades on this image, playing a hedonistic bachelor. “My character’s nothing like me . . . anymore,” he says, but adds wistfully, “it’s fun to play a guy who is a little immature, a bit of a scoundrel, with no consequences.” Sheen spent most of the 1990s in a haze of alcohol, drugs and call girls; in an unprecedented act of tough love, his father Martin even handed him over to the police after a drugs binge in 1998. Says Sheen Jr: “You couldn’t make the real story of my life and get it on network TV.” A challenge for Five, perhaps?
After last month’s human dissections, what next for Channel 4’s boundary-pushing science output? That would be a televised exorcism (Thurs, 11.05pm). Psychiatrists will witness a man having his inner demon cast out, while scientists measure the activity inside his brain. The “possessed”, whose identity is being kept secret, is described as a “spiritually unhappy, but otherwise normal individual”. Channel 4 says: “In the procedure, the spirit demon is first manifested, which might mean speaking in tongues and shaking. Then it’s cast out.” So head-spinning and pea-soup vomit are by no means guaranteed.
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Still in early development is the as-yet-uncast Whatever Love Means, a drama chronicling the love triangle between Diana, Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles; meanwhile, Stephen Frears is directing The Queen, detailing Her Majesty’s reaction to Diana’s death. Helen Mirren will star, with Michael Sheen playing Tony Blair. But what TV fate for James Hewitt? ITV1’s forthcoming Celebrity Wrestling.