Television choice
SCIENCE SHACK
BBC Two, 7.30pm
That nice Adam Hart-Davis is back with a new series of popular science programmes. It is an entertaining combination of digestible facts and eccentric experiments. Tonight they try to find out if a human being can imitate the basilisk lizard and walk on water. His team heads off to Windermere to try out various devices, while Hart-Davis also manages to give a lucid explanation of surface tension. It won’t be long before science students, like history students before them, forsake textbooks in favour of television.
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HORIZON
BBC Two, 9pm
Freak waves do not exist. Or rather, they shouldn’t. For years, sailors have been describing the sudden appearance of 30m-high waves, but nobody believed them. According to the accepted linear model, a freak wave has the likelihood of appearing once every 10,000 years. Now, it seems, the old men of the sea were right all along. Not only do these monsters of the deep exist, but they occur on a regular basis — and no ship is designed to withstand them. “You feel,” says one captain hit by a wave, “as if the end of the world has come.”
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ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: MADE IN BRITAIN
Channel 4, 9pm
The son of an Austrian Nazi who married a Kennedy, a bodybuilder who made a fortune in real estate and became the most popular actor with a German accent in the history of Hollywood: Schwarzenegger’s career has followed the can-do trajectory of the American dream. “My goal when I came to America was to do a Hercules movie. I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams,” he said. Now Arnie has to decide whether to run for the governorship of California. Surely the American electorate would be too sophisticated to elect a bad right-wing actor to high political office. Hasta la vista, baby.
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THE HIGHEST BIDDER
BBC Two, 9.50pm
In the mid-Eighties, a group of workmen found a dozen bottles of wine in a bricked-up cellar in Paris. They turned out to be 1787 Lafitte, the oldest wines in existence. Even more astonishing, each bottle was engraved with the initials “Th. J.” suggesting that they belonged to the then American ambassador to Paris, one Thomas Jefferson. When a single bottle was auctioned at Sotheby’s on December 5, 1985, it was bought for a record £105,000 by Kit Forbes, on behalf of his father Malcolm. His father had once remarked: “Men who never get carried away should be.” DC
CV: Normski
Heavy TV
Channel 4, 12.25am
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AKA Norman Anderson
Musical introduction His interest was sparked when he received a junior keyboard for Christmas when he was seven
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Big noise on the small screen As a protégé of Janet Street Porter he fronted early-Nineties BBC Two music shows such as Dance Energy
First job At 13 he was tea boy at the London Rock Shop
What next? Currently working on his autobiography
Satellite and digital TV choice
FOOTBALL FEVER
Adventure One, 8pm
FERGUSON V WENGER
Sky One, 10pm
There are a couple of treats in store tonight for fans of the beautiful game. First up is an excellent documentary exploring the fanatical support for football in Brazil through the eyes of one dedicated fan. Then a look back at the psychological battle that has been raging between the managers of Manchester United and Arsenal, Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, for the past seven years, which is now just as important to the outcome of the Premiership as anything that happens on the pitch.
LAW AND ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT
Hallmark, 10pm
They are still only on series one over on terrestrial, but lucky satellite viewers can tune in for a fourth series of hard-hitting drama with the New York sex crime investigators. Mike Mulvihill
Radio choice
BBC PROMS COMPOSER PORTRAIT
Radio 3, 9.30pm
After a concert including her music, the composer Judith Weir talks to Andrew McGregor.
CROSSING CONTINENTS
Radio 4, 11am
Lesotho, a small, barren country surrounded on all sides by South Africa, is at the centre of a multinational, multibillion, multifaceted battle about water. Esther Armah reports.
IT’S MY STORY: THE WITNESS
Radio 4, 8pm
See choice of the week. CC