NATURAL WORLD
BBC Two, 8pm
You know you’ve grown old not just when doctors look younger than your children and the phrase “cutting-edge comedy” fills you with dread, but when you find yourself watching natural history programmes with a sense of peace and wonder. This programme about the black bears of Montana is the perfect mix of intolerably sweet bear cubs, achingly beautiful landscape and extraordinary facts. Did you know that 90 per cent of all bear communication takes place through smell, and the nose of a bear is seven times more acute that that of a bloodhound? Here are bear cubs learning to climb trees, fish for trout in the river and stay alive in an environment filled with predators. If you’re in the right mood, it is wondrous.
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WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
BBC Two, 9pm
The actress Jane Horrocks defines herself as a control freak. It involves “doing too much and taking on too much and then being exhausted by the end of it and being cross with everybody. But not allowing anybody else to do it. Not delegating. Not saying: ‘Oh, would you please do that for me?’ Doing it — and saying: ‘You could have helped!’ ” It is a perfect description of the self-inflicted misery that comes from struggling valiantly to control the uncontrollable, and she wants to find out about the domineering women who passed on this wretched gene. It transpires that there was a good reason her ancestors were tough — her great grandparents experienced famine in Lancashire in the 1870s and lived through poverty, disease and starvation.
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BRAT CAMP
Channel 4, 9pm
The format remains exactly the same — badly behaved teenagers are sent into the Utah wilderness on a survival course. The programme does not address why they became delinquent in the first place, and one suspects that they are being encouraged to ham up their behaviour for the cameras. But there are glimpses of deeply pleasant (and badly bruised) children underneath all the foul-mouthed bravado. One of them is distraught at having to remove her piercings, on the grounds that they are “the only thing I have to comfort me in my world right now”. The staff have a few wacky New Age edges, but their policy is based on simultaneously building up the teenagers’ self-confidence and wearing them down with relentless kindness.
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DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES
Channel 4, 10pm
Halfway throu gh a dismal week on television, Desperate Housewives begins to feel like Chekhov. That cannot be healthy, even if tonight is one of the stronger episodes. In this episode, a pitched battle takes place between Lynette (Felicity Huffman) and an imaginary friend of her son, who threatens to fill the mummy-shaped vacuum left when she returned to work. Unlike episodes involving people incarcerated in basements, this one is rooted in the everyday mayhem that can occur as much in life as it does on television. Of course it’s not Chekhov. But in a bad week, at least it is pointing in the right direction.
Multichannel Choice
By Angus Batey
LIVE SPANISH CUP FOOTBALL:REAL ZARAGOZA V REAL MADRID
Sky Sports 1, 8pm
David Beckham and fellow Galacticos take to the field for this first leg of the semi-final (kick-off 8pm).
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LEFTIES
BBC Four, 9pm
The first of this new series looks at a group of white, middle class graduates who squatted in a street in Brixton, South London, in the 1970s. Those utopian anarchists, hippies and Marxists are pictures of respectability today, interviewed in their fitted kitchens or by their swimming pools, but as they recall their attempts to create a fair and equable community, it is clear that their dreams have not died. The story of how these bohemians, intellectuals and primal screamers forced Lambeth Council not to demolish the St Agnes Place squats in 1977 is particularly poignant, given the recent eviction of the street’s remaining long-term squatters
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AIR CRASH INVESTIGATION
National Geographic, 9pm
The series that frequent flyers would be well advised to avoid returns for a new run with a look at the terrifying ordeal of those on board Aloha Flight 243. On April 28, 1988, a Boeing 737 took off for a flight between Hawaiian islands. Minutes into the flight a section of the hull ruptured, and the plane’s fuselage was ripped off . . .
BUILDING THE WINTER GAMES
Discovery, 9pm
The building schedule for the Athens Olympics was widely criticised, but as we learn here, things have not run any more smoothly for Turin as the city hosts its first Winter Olympics. The fact that the city has no real winter sports tradition is merely the first obstacle: when naturally occurring asbestos is discovered on the bobsled site, the problems really begin to mount up.
CONFLICTS: AFGHANISTAN
BBC Three, 9.30pm
After the History Channel’s thorough account of the benighted central Asian country’s recent history, this programme looks at the experiences of Afghan youth. No preview tapes were available, but this series promises to examine the globe’s trouble spots in a “contemporary and informative way”, so expect Day Today-worthy graphics and a pumping soundtrack. AB
OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH
BBC Four, 10.30pm
Encompassing 31 years of modern British history from 1964 to 1995, Peter Flannery’s outstanding 11-hour political drama series from 1996 filters big issues through the main characters’ moral choices. Future stars Christopher Eccleston, Daniel Craig, Mark Strong and Gina McKee are each superb as the Newcastle friends whose lives interweave through the years as their fortunes waver, the tapestry kept vivid by impeccable period detail (ie, some seriously bad hair days). James Jackson