TV choice
CHERISHED
BBC One, 9pm/10.35pm
Sarah Lancashire and Timothy Spall star in a dramatisation of the case of Angela Cannings, who served 18 months in prison for supposedly murdering her children before the conviction was quashed on appeal. This powerful and superbly performed drama gives some small intimation of what it would feel like, first to lose three children and afterwards to be convicted on the basis of expert testimony that has since been discredited. Running through the film like a refrain are the only two options faced by Angela and her husband — to survive or go under. Better than any documentary, Cherished shows the emotional cost of survival. DC
TIM MARLOW ON . . . TURNER, WHISTLER, MONET
Five, 7.15pm
Tim Marlow provides a characteristically insightful guide to the exhibition at Tate Britain that shows the creative relationship between the giants of 19th-century art. If it boiled down to selecting an outright winner, Marlow would probably plump for Turner, although he doesn’t say so in as many words. The anti-hero of the exhibition is the River Thames, foetid with raw sewage and shrouded in smog, which Monet called “a painter’s dream”.
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CHAMPIONS LEAGUE LIVE: BAYERN MUNICH v ARSENAL
ITV1, 7.25pm
It’s Germany v England once again — let’s hope it doesn’t go to penalties.
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COMING OF AGE: THIS WORLD
BBC Two, 9pm
Coming of Age is a compendium of films about young people undergoing rites of passage in different parts of the world. Among them is a 15-year-old girl in China enduring a week’s basic military training outside Beijing; a 16-year-old boy in Uganda being circumcised; a little Inuit boy in northern Canada on his first hunt; a family of Iranian Jews travelling from Chicago to a bar mitzvah in Jerusalem, and a girl training to be a geisha in Japan. The ugliest film covers a 16-year-old boy being initiated into a racist skinhead organisation outside Moscow. No other programme this week illustrates more powerfully the diversity of human life in the 21st century.
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SHAMELESS
Channel 4, 10pm
Tonight, Frank Gallagher is coerced into launching a spurious claim for damages against the local shop. He’s like a mangy dog that has found a particularly rank morsel among the dustbins and refuses to give it up — even if it means bankrupting the shop, putting his son out of work and alienating himself from everyone on the estate. “I’m only after what’s right,” he says. Morality was never Frank’s strong point. DC
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Multichannel choice
POP SVENGALIS: TIME SHIFT
BBC Four, 9.50pm
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Once upon a time, music managers nurtured their charges to move the goalposts of pop culture, while making a quiet mint; these days Simon Fuller’s performing puppets are little more than hired hands, extras in the banal showbiz environment he’s created. Time Shift takes one of its whistlestop tours through the archives to outline how the British pop svengali’s ingenuity has evolved since the 1950s. It explains, for example, how the Stones boss Andrew Loog Oldham helped to shape the 1960s (Mick Jagger would ape Oldham’s flamboyance on stage and off it) and how Malcolm McLaren trained his Sex Pistols to be obnoxious. James Jackson
UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE
Sky Sports 2 and ITV2, 7pm
The Champions League kicks back into action for the first time this year with a potential thriller — the stars of Real Madrid taking on the Italian high flyers Juventus. Over on ITV2 Liverpool play host to Bayer Leverkusen (7pm).
BATTLE STATIONS
The History Channel, 8pm
Shown a couple of years back on Channel 4, the estimable Battle Stations tells the inside story of the men and machines involved in the Second World War. First up, an account of the Mosquito, the wooden wonder that was as happy at 30,000ft on a reconnaissance mission as it was skimming at treetop level in a dogfight. As these kind of simple war documentaries go, this one’s way above average.
EUROPE: A NATURAL HISTORY
BBC Four, 9pm and midnight
The second part of a visually arresting series demonstrates how Europe would have looked, and how it evolved, during the Ice Age. The impression is that this was a time of giants, both geological and biological. Kilometre-deep glaciers carved their way across the continent and the ice sucked up water, turning the seas and rivers into vast tundra valleys. This means mammoths wandered the North Sea while herds of reindeer migrated across the frozen Danube. Today, in fact, fishing trawlers off the Netherlands regularly haul up deer bones that have been lying on the ocean floor for millennia.
APE-MAN
UKTV History, 9pm
A rather murky documentary that will nonetheless be great viewing for those wanting to get in touch with their inner caveman. What does a lady with a talent for regressive “self-hypnosis” help to tell us about the mindsets of those who painted prehistoric cave murals in France? If you can stick with it through the programme’s mix of sober archaeology investigation and ancient-shamanic-ritual re-enactments, you’ll find out. JJ