COKE’S WATER BOMB
BBC Two, 7.30pm
The Money Programme provides a droll look back on the Dasani water fiasco, when Coca-Cola tried to persuade the British public to buy their purified version of Thames water. The product lasted less than five weeks on the shelves and turned into a public-relations disaster. The multimillion-pound launch descended into farce, providing headline writers with hours of innocent pleasure. Despite everything, Coca-Cola still maintains that Dasani is the real thing.
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BABY ER/BORN TOO SOON
BBC One, 8.50pm; Not Scotland/Channel 4, 9pm
Premature babies born at 24 weeks have between a 40 per cent and 50 per cent chance of survival. For every extra week of gestation, the chance of survival increases by roughly 10 per cent. For the parents, the first weeks are an extended nightmare. The rest of their lives go by the board, the hospital becomes their home and they can do nothing but stand by helplessly while these tiny vulnerable creatures battle one complication after another. While Baby ER follows doctors and nurses at the Neonatal Unit at Glasgow’s Princess Royal, Channel 4’s heartrending series continues as two more families watch their babies struggling to survive.
AIRCRASH INVESTIGATION: RACING THE STORM
Five, 10pm
Programmes about air disasters make arresting television. Few people fly without thinking about their plane going down. Each programme has a natural structure — a sequence of events building to an horrific climax. The survivors give interviews of unparalleled intensity. The dramatisations are easy to stage, and there is an eerie contrast between the calm techno babble in the cockpit and the ensuing carnage. Aircrash Investigation describes what happened when American Airlines Flight 1420 tried to land in the middle of a storm.
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IMAGINE . . . SAINT JOHN COLTRANE
BBC One, 10.35pm; Wales, 11.05pm
To mark the 40th anniversary of John Coltrane’s signature album A Love Supreme, Alan Yentob goes on a gently sceptical journey in search of one of the giants of jazz — the man who embraced free-form expression. Miles Davis sacked Coltrane because of his heroin addiction in 1957. Having kicked the habit, Coltrane found he could no longer play the saxophone. He made a pact with God — give back his talent, and he would become what a fellow musician, Archie Schepp, called “a preacher at the horn”. This is the story of an exceptional preacher.
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TRAVELS WITH A GRINGO
Sky Travel, 8pm
Bueno Aires, Sean Langan’s first stop on his South American travels, “looks like Rome on the surface but . . . it feels very different”. Considering that Argentina was declared bankrupt just a few months before his arrival, it is no surprise. In the first of a three-part look at globalisation, Langan witnesses a crisis that many believe was caused by the IMF, which is refusing any loans until public spending is reined in. With doctors working unpaid, schools closed and 80 per cent unemployment in some regions, it is hard to see how that can happen.
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MANHUNT: CHARLES NG
History Channel, 8.30pm
This bleak but interesting series on criminals who fled the law focuses on the notorious sex killer Charles Ng, a pathological woman-hater whose murder trial in 1999 was the most expensive in American history.
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THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN REPORTING: STRADDLING THE FENCE
CNN, 11pm
Having lived in Israel during the mid-1980s, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman returns to witness the impact of the huge security wall from both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks for many when he claims the division is “absolutely necessary” to prevent suicide attacks but the president of Al-Quds, the Arab university in Jerusalem, believes that it is “a statement of aggression”. Concluding his incisive, impartial account, Friedman depressingly admits: “I have that sinking feeling that the situation is utterly broken.”