CRITICS’ CHOICE
Pick of the day
The Aliens (E4, 9pm)
Channel 4 made a strong sci-fi showing with last year’s android drama series Humans, a show that was complex, dark and scripted elegantly enough to bear the weight of its ethical issues. This new series doesn’t quite ace the speculative-fiction test with the same flair, despite owing a debt to BBC3’s In the Flesh.
The premise is straightforward enough: 40 years ago, humanoid aliens crash-landed in Britain. Now segregated by a Trump-style wall in a town called Troy, their main source of income is selling the hair off their bodies to humans as a potent drug. It is not a place that border guard Lewis (Michael Socha) would dream of visiting, yet events conspire to send him over the wall to see how the other half lives. It looks convincingly nasty and dangerous, but the sharpness of the set-up is not always matched by the dialogue.
Victoria Segal
Turkish delights?
Sex In Strange Places (BBC3)
Like Reggie Yates, Stacey Dooley has become a fine presenter — perhaps not the hardest-hitting journalist in the world, but somebody who is capable both of telling a story with empathy and bravely standing her ground. In this programme she travels to Turkey to discover why the country’s state brothels are being closed down and how politics, religion and sex are colliding in ways that leave sex workers in an increasingly vulnerable position. She also meets a Syrian refugee, forced by poverty to work as a prostitute, and two young women who offer harrowing accounts of the sexual abuse perpetrated by Isis.
Tyne and werewolf
Wolfblood (CBBC, 4.35pm)
While it is odd to have a tea-time lycanthropy slot on children’s television, this lupine drama’s appeal is easy to understand. A junior version of Being Human, its glossy supernatural content is deeply rooted in issues of friendship, home and identity, a winning combination that has pushed it through into a fourth series. Now filmed in Newcastle and Gateshead, away from the original rural setting, the show follows “wolfblood” Jana (Leona Vaughan) as she heads into the city in search of a new pack.
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Time of their lives
Back In Time For The Weekend (BBC2, 8pm)
The final edition of this time-travelling pop-history series boils up the previous five instalments into the kind of thrifty retrospective stock that would make a 1950s housewife proud. The Ashby Hawkins family look back over what they have learnt from their accelerated experience of five decades of British life — the 1970s come out of the experiment extraordinarily well — but in order to add a little new content, they are also shown the future of leisure, trying out robotic lawn mowers and state-of-the-art gyms. It has been an illuminating look at changing expectations, only marred by wild generalisations — “We’ve become a nation obsessed with how fit we are” — and the unnecessary destruction of the household piano.
Let’s stay together
Born To Be Different (C4, 9pm)
One must hope that as they grow into adulthood and the challenges of earning money and making their way become more pressing, the children with disabilities who have contributed to this brilliant series over the past 15 years will continue to collaborate with the producers. The contrasts between relatively benign conditions, such as the swimmer Hamish’s achondroplasia, and Shelbie’s profound physical and mental disabilities have become increasingly stark as they mature, a painful fact not lost on the parents who have bonded throughout the experience and who speak of the continuing support they lend each other.
Nothing but the truth?
Life And Death Row (BBC1, 10.45pm)
The series on capital punishment concludes by focusing on “truth”, while acknowledging that in the absence of confession or demonstrable fact, the justice system can only take the best guess as to what this constitutes. Tonight’s story is a tragic case, the murder of Justin Back, 18, an Ohio lad who was killed by two visiting friends. While there was no dispute over who first attacked the boy, the pair each claimed the other was the mastermind behind the crime.
Victoria Segal and Helen Stewart
Sport choice
T20 Cricket Zimbabwe v Hong Kong (Sky Sports 2, 9am); Scotland v Afghanistan (Sky Sports 2, 1.30pm)
Snooker (ITV4, 12.45pm/ 6.45pm) World Grand Prix
Cycling (Eurosport, 3pm)
Greyhound Racing (Sky Sports 3, 7pm)
Radio pick of the day
Breakfast (R3, 6.30am)
Clemency Burton-Hill is the first of today’s all-female crop of presenters to mark International Women’s Day. All the music right through to 12.30am will also be composed by women and the only male voice to be heard is that of Donald Macleod on Composer Of The Week (6.30pm, examining Barbara Strozzi, a 17th-century Venetian). Tune elsewhere if you want more males — the return of the excellent Law In Action (R4, 4pm) is, as always, hosted by Joshua Rozenberg — but why only for a measly four episodes?
Paul Donovan
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You say
Could the scientists who recently detected gravitational waves create a device sensitive enough to detect any sound made when Sarah Lancashire moves her lips?
Patrick Brosnan
Why doesn’t the script writer complain?
Barry Binch
Is it that the director (and here also the writer) Sally Wainwright is so familiar with the script that she becomes unaware that others may not comprehend the very fast and low delivery?
Tony Leek
I must, I’m afraid, add my name to the list of those who can’t hear half of what Catherine says. Nor Frances nor, indeed, Tommy. Otherwise, an excellent series.
Martyn Hooper
See The mumble corps, in Culture
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FILM CHOICE
Insomnia (2002)
Sky Movies Thriller, 12.10pm/9pm
Al Pacino shines as a big-city cop who seems to carry his guilty secrets in the bags under his eyes when he arrives in Alaska to investigate a murder. Christopher Nolan’s thriller is enriched by the sense of sleepless disorientation conveyed by its setting: a land of eternal sunshine.
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966)
Sky Movies Select, 7pm
The director Sergio Leone all but invented the spaghetti western’s cinematic vocabulary — bloody violence, operatic plots, gallows humour, awful dubbing — and proves his literacy in this stylised movie, which stars Clint Eastwood as one of three rival gunfighters pursuing stolen gold.
71 (2014)
Film 4, 9pm
Set during the Troubles, Yann Demange’s immersive drama wrings sweaty urgency and creates stomach-knotting immediacy from the story of a young British squaddie trapped behind sectarian lines in night-time Belfast. While the film has its contrived moments, it grips like a vice.
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Forget Me Not (2010)
BBC1, 11.45pm
The tale of a suicidal musician who befriends a hassled barmaid during a long dark night of the soulmates in London, Alexander Holt and Lance Roehrig’s romantic drama riffs on Before Sunrise, adds a few bars of Once and plays out in a distinctly minor key — yet does well on a shoestring budget.
Previews by Trevor Lewis