SLEEPER CELL
Channel 4, 10pm
Sleeper Cell is wham-bam rhubarb in a contemporary wrapping. An African-American FBI agent (Michael Ealy) penetrates a terrorist cell in Los Angeles. “I am putting together a team of holy warriors,” the merciless leader Faris Al-Farik (Oded Fehr) tells his recruits. “Believers who are ready to strike without warning, without pity.” The good guy, acting virtually single-handedly, has to race against time to stop the bad guys causing mischief with weapons of mass destruction, while at the same time developing a relationship with an attractive single mother. Every character is a stereotype and every line is a cliché. “Where are we going?”, asks a terrorist. “Paradise, of course,” replies the leader. If only.
MACINTYRE’S BIG STING
Five, 8pm
If you want to order the theft of a £50,000 car (in this case, a 1969 Aston Martin) it will cost you £800. That’s £400 up front and another £400 on delivery. The man you need for the job is called Shane “No Fear” Parker, who knows loads about nicking cars. (He’s called “No Fear” because, he says: “Arv dun about seven and a half year behind the door. I don’t give a f**k about nuffin. I’ll do anyfin. Don’t bovver me.”) He agrees to steal the Aston Martin for Donal MacIntyre’s undercover team, whereupon they nab him in flagrante with the help of 15 covert cameras and a couple of burly security guards. Bang to rights, he promises he’ll never, ever go thievin’ again. Honest, guv.
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TURN BACK TIME
BBC Two, 10pm
Barry Humphries is Dara O’Briain’s guest tonight, which produces half an hour of total happiness. Seeing Humphries without Dame Edna is a disconcerting experience. He has so many of the great lady’s intonations, mannerisms and turns of phrase; he shares her acute sense of timing and dominates the stage in the same way that she does. It takes a while to get used to the idea that this is not Dame Edna pretending to be a man.
Equally extraordinary is a rabbit that O’Briain pulls out of the hat. When Humphries was in Cornwall with his wife in 1962, he fell over a cliff and landed on a ledge 150ft below, breaking various bones. The researchers managed to dig up ITN footage of his rescue by helicopter, which Humphries had never seen before.
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ADMISSION IMPOSSIBLE
Channel 4, 9pm
Many people will be all too familiar with the stress and anxiety captured in this film, which follows a group of parents as they do everything they can to get their children into sought-after schools. (One little girl says she needs to get into a good school so she won’t end up dealing drugs.) The parents pay for tutors, spend hours every night and at weekends coaching their children, and even consider changing their religion — just to get the type of education that should be every child’s right. For some, it becomes an unhealthy obsession.
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“You only get one chance in life,” says one father, “and if you fail, you fail for life.” No pressure, then.
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BEST OF THE REST . . .
JANE HALL
ITV1, 9pm
Jane Hall (Sarah Smart) reaches the end of her ride. But has she booked herself a return ticket?
Multichannel choice
BEAUTY AND THE GEEK
E4, 10pm
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Series two of the US version of the odd-couple dating show starts with a Pop Idol-style casting call edition. Last year’s winners, Richard and Lauren, go out on the road encouraging boffins away from their Rubik’s Cubes and stumping beauties with questions such as “What is the sun?” (Answer: “A planet. But it’s too hot to live on. You can’t go there.”). Next week, the real competition begins.
CHAMPIONS LEAGUE LIVE
ITV4, 7.30pm
Arsenal are 3-0 up as they welcome Dinamo Zagreb to the Emirates Stadium for the second leg of the third-round qualifier.
STORYVILLE: BEHIND THE COUCH
BBC Four, 9.40pm
The Hollywood on Hollywood season continues with everything you ever wanted to know about casting. Following three would-be actors as they traipse around LA acquiring agents, publicity photographs and auditions, the film also charts the making of an independent production from script to shoot. In between, veterans of the only job in film that doesn’t have its own Oscar category offer their wisdom on how the right cast can make or break a movie and lay one old myth — that of the casting couch — to rest.
BLUE MURDER
ITV3, 11.05pm
In recent years Caroline Quentin seems to have cornered the market in playing plucky single mums picking up the pieces after a husband’s midlife crisis.
In Life Begins she was a housewife forced back into the job market, but this police procedural casts her as a copper, Janine Lewis, who comes home to celebrate her promotion to detective chief inspector, only to find her husband with the au pair. With three kids, another on the way and a serial killer on the loose, Lewis has her handsfull.
Daytime choice
ROSWELL (TMV, 1994)
Sci-Fi, 3pm
No, not the teen drama that is also showing on Sci-fi every day, but the rather fine made-for-TV docudrama about the alleged alien crash in New Mexico. Kyle MacLachlan, Martin Sheen and Dwight Yoakum star. GABRIELLE STARKEY