HOTEL BABYLON
BBC One, 9pm
Trashy and fun, Hotel Babylon is like an upmarket version of Footballers’ Wives set in a luxury London hotel. It stars Tamzin Outhwaite as a brassy hotel manager, with Max Beesley as the chief receptionist intent on becoming her deputy, and it purports to present the reality behind a five-star world of money, sex and glamour. “My job is to serve the clients,” says the Beesley character, “however absurd, bizarre or perverse their requirements may be.” The opening episode revolves around the management’s attempt to get an American rock band to trash their suite to generate publicity for the hotel. With its cheerful music and flip cynicism, the series — like the hotel itself — offers a short-term winter break.
HORIZON
BBC Two, 9pm
Incredibly, it is estimated that 50 per cent of all human conceptions — from the moment the egg is fertilised — end in miscarriage, often before women even know they are pregnant. Fortunately, the proportion who have multiple miscarriages is only around 1 per cent. This film looks at the work of Professor Lesley Regan at the Recurrent Miscarriage Unit at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, which treats 1,000 patients a year who have had three or more miscarriages. This is the largest such unit in Europe and its work deserves to be celebrated — particularly by those quick to criticise the NHS.
ELEVENTH HOUR
ITV1, 9pm
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This new drama series, starring Patrick Stewart and Ashley Jensen (of Extras fame), has been hyped as ITV’s answer to Doctor Who. But beneath a thin smear of modernity, it is the usual formulaic ITV wham-bammery that has been made a thousand times before. Stewart plays a government scientist with the Jensen character acting as his armed escort. Together they pursue villains involved in crimes based on contemporary scares. In tonight’s episode, for example, a bereaved father pays for backstreet cloning so that his dead son can be reborn. Apart from a little pop science — with the principles of cloning explained using grapes and tweezers — there are the usual guns, car chases, races-against- time and the bad guys wearing leather jackets and smoking. At 90 minutes, it is a dull old haul.
TONY BLAIR ROCK STAR
Channel 4, 10pm
Channel 4 has a wicked streak — think of The Queen’s Sister — that adds considerably to the jollity of life. Here, the programme-makers have rounded up a varied bunch of friends and associates who knew Tony Blair back in the 1970s when he wanted to be a rock god. They remember his people skills, acting talent, confidence, self-promotion and ability to “get out of pretty well all situations”. To some, he seemed ingratiating, although he was apparently never made a prefect because the housemaster felt that his leadership was likely to take people in the wrong direction. The programme, fleshed out with hilariously naff Comic Strip-style dramatisations, shows that if you can’t be Mick Jagger, you can still get satisfaction from running the country.
MULTICHANNEL TELEVISION
by James Jackson
LIVE GOLF: ABU DHABI GOLF CHAMPIONSHIP
Sky Sports 1, 6.30am
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The opening day of the inaugural Abu Dhabi Golf Championship, which is now a European Tour event. Big John Daly is among the big-name, big-hitting and (in his case) big-waisted golfers scheduled to compete.
THE NEW HEROES
Community Channel, 8pm
Today’s heroes aren’t just firefighters, astronauts and the like. According to this programme, they are the social entrepreneurs whose innovations bring empowering solutions to problems around the world. In exploring their work, this new four-part series offers grim reportage of situations such as — in tonight’s case — child slavery in India. Robert Redford, well known for his liberal sentiment, provides restrained narration to the often shocking footage — this episode is a clear snapshot of a world apart.
RIPPING YARNS/MARK LAWSON TALKS TO MICHAEL PALIN
BBC Four, 8.30pm/9pm
After the Monty Python TV series wrapped up in the mid-1970s, Michael Palin was given carte blanche to create these amusingly absurd parodies of classic schoolboy tomes, which now play rather like a set of extended Python sketches. Repeated over nine weeks, Ripping Yarns kicks off with the pilot, a delightful spoof of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, highlighting the rigours of 1920s public school life, such as being shot, flogging the headmaster and being nailed to a wall. After this, an amiable interview with the ever-amiable Palin.
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JAMIE OLIVER
Biography Channel, 8.30pm
Having been near-canonised by the media last year after his school dinners TV campaign, Jamie Oliver’s stock simmers higher than ever — time indeed for an insight into what makes Mr Motivator tick. If you can get past the first ten minutes of inanities (eg, “Jamie Oliver has made cookery the new rock’n’roll!”), this profile offers a few hints.
THE DARK SIDE OF HIPPOS
National Geographic, 9pm
Hippos are, of course, not the benign, veggie mud-lovers as often portrayed; they are, in fact, responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other wild animal. Featuring dramatic reconstructions, this is natural history that leans towards the When Hippos Go Mad! variety.
TYLER’S COUNTER CULTURE
BBC Four, 10pm
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Tyler Brûlé, branding expert and founder of Wallpaper magazine, is paid to travel to six countries to find out how people shop in the high street chains in different cities (in Sweden, Libya, Tokyo, the US, Italy and tonight, Russia) and what this reflects about their individual cultures. In Russia he explores how shopping has created a whole new class system since the early 1990s — think Oligarchs’ Wives.