PUT ME TOGETHER AGAIN
Channel 4, 10pm
Anyone who can bring themselves to watch this film will end up counting every one of their blessings. It follows two people living in a unit run by the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Trust in Liverpool. One is a 37-year-old mother who was about to start university when she was mugged, causing severe brain damage. Every five minutes, the whole of her short-term memory is wiped out, so she believes that her 15-year-old daughter is still only 11. The other was a high- flying engineer who had a stroke and is plagued by obsessive and aggressive behaviour. With infinite patience and skill, the staff try to help them regain their former personalities. Brain damage can happen to anyone without warning, and it is heartbreaking to watch.
What with James Miller tonight and Simon Thurley tomorrow, English country houses are well served on television this week. Here, Miller visits Deene Park, near Corby in Northamptonshire, a gorgeous pile built by Henry VIII’s Lord Chief Justice, which has been in the same family for 500 years. The present owners, Edmund Brudenell and his wife Marion, took over 50 years ago when the house was in a shocking condition at the end of the war, and they have made it their life’s work to restore the building and its gardens. They have done a magnificent job — for all its beauty and grandeur, Deene Park has a warmth and cosiness that comes from being lived in and loved. They have even managed to buy back some of the precious booksfrom the library that were confiscated by Cromwell.It is an informative, civilised and altogether delightful little programme.
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HORIZON
BBC Two, 9pm
How many planets exist in our solar system? If you were about to say nine, think again. According to this droll and enjoyable programme, Pluto isn’t a planet after all. It’s just another asteroid — a tiny lump of ice racketing around on the extreme edge of our solar system. It isn’t even the biggest lump of ice in the region. But if you persist in referring to Pluto as a planet, other galactic lumps will have to be given planetary status as well.
Mind you, there is one big problem. Nobody actually knows what a planet is. At this precise moment, the International Astronomical Union is thrashing out a new definition that will be announced in September. The fate of poor little Pluto hangs in the balance.
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BEST OF THE REST . . .
SUMMER EXHIBITION
BBC Two, 8pm
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In the final programme, Vic Reeves reveals the most popular exhibit.
HOUSE
Five, 9pm
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In the penultimate episode, the grouchy medic treats a woman suffering heart problems and hallucinations.
Multichannel choice
Andrew Graham-Dixon, adopting his best Waldemar Januszczak act, presents this investigation of the machinations behind the scenes that influenced the direction of British art in the 18th century. In the early 1700s, British painters were little more than hacks, churning out “art by the yard” for indiscriminate and largely uninterested clients, while the landed gentry patronised artists whose work they had come across on their Grand Tours of Europe. Inspired by the formidable iconoclast and hard drinker William Hogarth and Sir Joshuah Reynolds, a canny operator who reinvented the society portrait, artists learned the value and tactics of self- promotion. From chaotically over-subscribed exhibitions came a move to create a gallery space-cum-art school, a notion that was crystallised by the inception of the Royal Academy of Arts.
SMALLPOX 2002: SILENT WEAPON
UKTV Documentary, 8pm
Brian Cox narrates this disturbing docudrama that examines the possible effects of a bioterrorist attack on London and New York.
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99 MOST BIZARRE . . .
Sky One, 9pm
Have you heard the one about the skydiver whose parachute got caught on the tail of a passing plane, but lived to tell the tale? Or about the fellow who was swallowed by a hippopotamus, yet managed to extricate himself? Or about the teenage athlete who became impaled on a javelin? Sky has, and they tell all in Survival Stories, the second part of this wince- inducing series.
SUPERVOLCANOES INVESTIGATED
National Geographic, 10pm
The last supervolcano to have erupted did so 74,000 years ago. Another has been found in the US. What would happen if it blew its top? AB
Daytime choice
LIVE EUROPEAN TOUR GOLF/LIVE INTERNATIONAL CRICKET
Sky Sports 1, 10am/Sky Sports 1, 3pm
A double dose of action: Emanuele Canonica begins his defence of the Johnnie Walker Championship at Gleneagles and the West Indies and India start their third Test. AB