CRITICS’ CHOICE
Pick of the day
Digging For Britain (BBC4, 9pm)
Presented by Alice Roberts and Matt Williams, the archaeology series returns for a three-week run with the excitement level ratcheted up by the scientists filming as they dig to record the actual moments of discovery. While there is no Detectorists-style Saxon hoard bleeping away tonight (that comes next week), there is still plenty to maintain viewer interest in an episode that jumps from site to site in the west of England, Wales and the Channel Islands.
A find at Marden Henge in Wiltshire, for example, suggests that Neolithic people used to sweat it out in a kind of sauna; near Winterborne Kingston, in Dorset, they used to bury intact animals in the form of hybrid creatures, such as a sheep with a cow’s head on its rear end; and in Monmouthshire, an archaeologist was so sure there was something big in a parcel of land that he bought the field — and he was right.
Martin James
Wanted down under
The Secret History Of My Family (BBC2, 8pm)
The people who gave us The Secret History of Our Streets have struck again. This time we are brought the story of three pickpocketing sisters who were raised in poverty in 1830s Shoreditch and the show traces their family tree to find their descendants happily unmarked by criminality. Two of the Gadbury girls were banished to Van Diemen’s Land (today’s Tasmania), where they grew a fine crop of enlightened senior politicians and lawyers; the other one stayed behind in London’s East End, where, to this day, we find her Spurs-supporting window-cleaner and binman relatives. There must be a moral here somewhere.
Intelligent crime drama
Murder (BBC2, 9pm)
There are neither car chases nor conversations in Robert Jones’s intriguing dramas. The second of three stories is that of The Lost Weekend, a fragmentary account from those involved in the investigation that ensues after an attractive philanthropist goes missing. Arla had spent a couple of days on a binge at the home of her posh boyfriend, Dominic (Sebastian Armesto) — had he seen her off under the influence of drugs? Arla’s colleague, Bryony (Hayley Squires), thinks so, but down-to-earth DCI Goss (Anne-Marie Duff) is initially open-minded. With short, static scenes and testimonies as the pieces, the picture gradually comes together like a jigsaw puzzle — one with a lot of sky.
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Mission Survive (ITV, 9pm)
Bear Grylls has dumped seven celebrities in the South African bush, and they’re hungry already. Fortunately, as we learn at the beginning of episode two, he has left a springbok carcass hanging from a tree, and if the contestants can find it, gut it, butcher it and store the meat, there is plenty of food to go round. Ice-skating judge Jason Gardiner’s fear of dirty hands is not particularly helpful in this task, nor is singer Samantha Barks’s vegetarianism, or Neil Morrissey’s fluttery heart. Someone suggests killing and cooking him. “Don’t eat my liver,” he warns.
Instructional guide?
Quantico (Alibi, 9pm)
Employing so many of the storytelling techniques and ideas of How to Get Away with Murder, Shonda Rhimes’s popular university drama, this unashamedly derivative ensemble show could just as easily have been called How to Get Away with Terrorism. Here, a glamorous young FBI trainee (Priyanka Chopra, a former Miss World) emerges from the rubble of a large-scale attack and is almost immediately charged with having organised it. The action then switches to nine months earlier and the first day of training, where we are led to assume that another of her classmates is guilty. It is slick, enjoyable and empty.
Quakerphobia
Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (BBC2, 10pm)
“It’s all very well being ironically Islamophobic in a working-men’s club full of Guardian readers,” says the comedian in Stoke Newington. With asides to camera directly insulting xenophobic viewers (who won’t be watching anyway), Lee takes such religious prejudice as his theme. One amusing strand is an evolving parodic attack on Quakers, with their disagreeable porridge habits and nasty buckle shoes — but a film insert suggests they may lack a sense of humour and wreak a terrible revenge.
Martin James and Helen Stewart
Sport choice
T20 Cricket (Sky Sports 2, 9am) Scotland v Zimbabwe, Hong Kong v Afghanistan
Snooker (ITV4, 12.45pm/ 6.45pm) World Grand Prix
Biathlon (Eurosport, 2.15pm)
Tennis (Sky Sports 3, 7pm; BT Sport 1, 7pm) Indian Wells
Super League (Sky Sports 2, 7.30pm) Widnes Vikings v Hull FC
Radio pick of the day
Free Thinking (R3, 10pm)
Rana Mitter discusses Peter H Wilson’s magisterial new history of the Holy Roman Empire, and the state of Christianity today, with Rupert Shortt, the religion editor of The Times Literary Supplement and author of Christianophobia – A Faith Under Attack, and Professor Janet Soskice of Cambridge University. A four-day digital pop-up station called BBC Radio 2 Country goes on air to cover the country music festival at London’s O2, a musical bonanza also previewed, naturally, by Bob Harris (R2, 7pm).
Paul Donovan
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You say
You didn’t print my email when I said that it is acceptable if a weekly run of a series is interrupted one week for a high-profile event, when each episode of the series is self-contained. But these interruptions are not acceptable when each episode forms part of the same story. Expensive productions need to provide continuity to the viewer; if a broadcaster has an event to show, then it should move the displaced episode to a different day, time or channel that week, not delay it by a week. BBC1 has done it again with Shetland.
William Wilson
What a shame The Night Manager (BBC1) has been forced to work in Jamaica Inn.
Ron Emler
Are you fed up of the politically and ethnically correct left-wing bias of the BBC? Then why not try Russia Today?
B Watt
Send your comments to: telly@sunday-times.co.uk
FILM CHOICE
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My Darling Clementine (1946)
Film 4, 12.35pm
As its title implies, there is more to John Ford’s masterwork than the climactic gunfight at the OK Corral between Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp and the Clanton gang. Woven round this showdown is a hesitant romance, a stirring study of fraternity and an elegy to the Old West, among other incidental pleasures. B/W
A Mighty Heart (2007)
Sky Movies Select, 4.15pm
Angelina Jolie sheds her Tomb Raider image and shows her acting chops in this story of Mariane Pearl, whose husband, Daniel, was kidnapped by terrorists in Pakistan. While Michael Winterbottom’s drama can feel a tad worthy and stagy, its star’s performance brims with integrity and humanity.
Scream (1996)
TCM, 9pm
The director Wes Craven ripped up the rule book on horror films with this self-referential slasher movie that plays on genre conventions to give a razor-sharp new edge to a blunted formula. It mostly succeeds, too, as a psycho in an Edvard Munch-inspired mask stalks a group of high-school students.
Previews by Trevor Lewis