JACKANORY
BBC One, 4.30pm
The iconic storytelling programme returns for two weeks and two stories. Today (continuing Wednesday and Friday), John Sessions reads Muddle Earth by Paul Stewart.
DISPATCHES
Channel 4, 8pm
The NHS is facing infinite demand with only finite recourses, and it cannot afford to pay for everybody to have any treatment available. In practice, this means that there is a postcode lottery in operation. Waiting times, availability of treatment and quality of service depend on where you live. Jon Snow points out the inequities of the system; he talks to the Junior Health Minister Andy Burnham, who tells him that such differences are integral to the system, and he follows three individuals who — having been refused the best available treatment — are fighting the authorities. The point of the programme is to boost patient power and encourage people not to take “no” for an answer. As such, it is highly effective.
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MONKETS, RATS AND ME: ANIMAL TESTING
BBC Two, 9pm
This long documentary follows the protests that have been taking place on the streets of Oxford since 2004 against the university’s new £18 million animal experimentation lab. The site was protected by strict security; workmen were forced to wear balaclavas to conceal their identity, and the protesters even went so far as to target a firm that supplied parts to one of the cranes on site. The protesters claim that scientists are torturing animals; whereas the few scientists who are willing to respond say that their work is essential, the animals suffer no pain and the protesters have adopted a campaign of intimidation that is fundamentally undemocratic. The film examines sides of the debate before coming down — hesitantly and squeamishly — on the side of vivisection.
DISAPPEARING BRITAIN
Five, 9pm
Ricky Tomlinson, a committed socialist of the old school, pays tribute to Britain’s miners. “It’s as if we want to forget that we once had a coal industry,” he says. Travelling to the site of closed mines, which have now been reduced to what Tomlinson calls “acres and acres and acres of bugger all”, he talks to retired miners about the hardships they endured and the camaraderie they enjoyed. The work underground was punishing and dangerous. Women did hard labour on the coalface. Housing conditions were often abysmal. But local communities were bound together by intense loyalty and humour, and — even now — mines such as Tower in South Wales (bought by the miners with their redundancy money) continue the fight against the collapse of the industry.
SKINT
BBC One, 10.45pm
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The considerable achievement of this fly-on-the-wall documentary, which is part of a short season by the BBC to highlight poverty and homelessness, is that it manages to draw back that curtain of anonymity and show the individuals behind the statistics. Everyone featured in the programme has his or her problems, which doesn’t in any way negate their humanity. They are lively, intelligent and sympathetic people who are doing the best they can in impossible circumstances.“ People think life on benefits is easy,” says one man. “Believe me, it’s not.”
MULTICHANNEL TELEVISION
by Gabrielle Starkey
TAKE HOME CHEF
Discovery Real Time, 11am
The rather dashing Australian chef Curtis Stone starts a new series in which he persuades a supermarket shopper to take him home so that he can whip up an alternative feast with the contents of his or her basket.
DAWSON’S CREEK
Five Life, 7pm
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With This Life back on our screens, it feels like the right time to welcome back another old friend from the 1990s, whose attractive characters tackled a whole range of thorny adolescent dramas over its five-year run. In tonight’s pilot episode, 15-year-old Dawson (James Van Der Beek) falls for new girl Jen (Michelle Williams), stirring up a jealous streak in his tomboy friend Joey (Katie Holmes).
THE MARTIANS AND US
BBC Four, 9pm
It’s all over — literally — as this commendably in-depth history of British science fiction bows out with a look at disaster scenarios. Inspired by the use of poison gas during the First World War, the author M. P. Shiel imagined a world laid waste in The Purple Cloud, kick-starting a century of terrifying fictional catastrophes, from world-swamping floods to plagues, nuclear war and deadly walking plants. Doris Lessing and Will Self are among the contributors discussing Shiel, John Wyndham, J. G. Ballard and Douglas Adams.
THE REAL CRACKER
Crime and Investigation Network, 9pm
Anyone interested in murder mysteries won’t want to miss this new four-part series about two of Britain’s most respected criminal profilers. In the first episode, Dr Julian Boon — more Morse than Cracker, in his smart vintage car — drives down to Worthing, where an elderly woman has been beaten to death. As the police close in on their man, it has all the tension of great drama.
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RANDOM QUEST
BBC Four, 10pm
The centrepiece to the Science Fiction Britannia season is this elegant but slightly ponderous drama, adapted from a short story by John Wyndham.
Sam West plays a scientist who wakes up in another dimension when his latest experiment goes wrong. It is the same year, but the world is technologically different and his life has taken a different, more successful, path. He has a fantastic house and a beautiful wife (Kate Ashfield), but his marriage is on the rocks. Then, just as he begins to understand this new life and is falling for his wife, he is snapped back into his old world, with no way of getting back to the woman he loves.
Essentially, this is another version of Life on Mars, but far more interested in ideas than action, and the two leads struggle to inject much life into it. That said, it does make great use of London locations to describe the two technologically diverse worlds, and it keeps a surprisingly emotional punch for the end.
TOTALLY VIRAL
UKTV G2, 10.30pm
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This new series of internet clippings focuses on the often hilarious short films that whizz between e-mail inboxes, such as the footage of office workers leaping over desks in an improvised olympics.