DON’T GET ME STARTED
Five, 7.15pm
Jenni Murray, the presenter of Woman’s Hour, marks the return of this excellent soapbox series by arguing the case for assisted suicide. She never wants to be in the position where she has to rely on others to care for her, and the living will, she maintains, doesn’t go far enough. “When my time comes,” she says, “it should be my right to choose to take my own life.” Eighty per cent of the population agrees with her, believing that nobody should be forced to endure excruciating pain against their wishes. So she gets together with two of her friends and, in a faintly surreal conversation held in an empty restaurant, they agree to help one another to do the deed when the time comes.
MEGA FLOOD: PERFECT DISASTER
Five, 8pm
According to television producers, sooner or later we are all going to be engulfed by a catastrophe — it is just a question of which one and when. Tonight’s “perfect” disaster imagines London flooded. All it would need is heavy rainfall to fill up the Thames and overwhelm the city’s drainage system, coupled with a storm surge in the North Atlantic and a high spring tide, and that would be that. The Thames barrier would be breached; hundreds of lives would be lost; there would be billions of pounds’ worth of damage to property and infrastructure and a collapse in confidence in London as a financial centre. What with bird flu, terrorist attacks, financial meltdowns, solar storms, volcanic eruptions — are we in danger of Armageddon fatigue?
RETURN OF THE GOODIES
BBC Two, 9pm
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They’re back. Two Goodies (Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor) are appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe, and all three — including the strange and wonderful Bill Oddie — were reunited for this two-hour special that went out at Christmas. They break into their old office to present a show that is part documentary, part sitcom and part studio free-for-all. They look back on their giddy rise to fame, their wild antics and undisciplined anarchy in the early 1970s; they reveal the truth behind the Mary Whitehouse saga (she accused them of being too “sexually oriented”) and they try to track down their three-seater bicycle. Among the fans and assorted loonies appearing on the show are Rolf Harris, Martin Freeman, Tony Blackburn, Jon Culshaw, Mark Gatiss and Phill Jupitus.
LOST
Channel 4, 10pm
Lost is like a variation on an old party game. One imagines a bunch of scriptwriters sitting around in a circle. Someone writes a paragraph of plot and a few lines of dialogue, then folds up the paper so that only the last line is visible and hands it to the next writer, who writes the next paragraph of plot and dialogue and passes it on. The longer the game lasts, the more bizarre the story becomes. It produces examples of wacky dialogue (for example, “Have you seen your father since he died?”) and conjures up every conceivable plot twist, without regard to character or continuity. Tonight, one character says to another: “You think it is all just random?” Yup, pretty much.
MULTICHANNEL TELEVISION
by Gabrielle Starkey
NTERNATIONAL FOOTBALL: WALES v BULGARIA
Sky Sports 1, 7.30pm
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John Toshack puts the final touches to his preparations for the Euro 2008 qualifiers with this friendly at the Liberty Stadium, Swansea.
COOKING IN THE DANGER ZONE
BBC Four, 8.30pm
With the exception of Afghanistan, Stefan Gates’s destinations have hardly been the danger zones of the title; instead, they are places where food is a complex, often political, subject, and Gates is faced with the kind of dishes most of us would run a mile from. Tonight he visits China, where fast food is booming and farmers are being turfed off their land to make way for luxury housing developments. Smelling a story, Gates tries to meet some of these uprooted country folk, but his Government minders steer him towards a model village of happily re-employed workers who have swapped their shacks for palatial houses.
Giving up on the tricky reportage, Gates instead turns to his fail-safe TV recipe and visits a restaurant that specialises in yak penis.
AIRCRASH INVESTIGATION
National Geographic, 9pm
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Shaky re-enactments and cut-price graphics tell a dramatic story from the Gulf War, when a DHL aircraft taking off from Baghdad airport was hit by a surface-to-air missile launched by terrorists trying to impress a French reporter. The crew was forced to land the plane without any controls.
GREAT WRITERS OF THE 20TH CENTURY
Artsworld, 9pm
This gentle, somewhat creaky series turns its attention to Ernest Hemingway, making use of a lengthy interview with his sister Sunny.
DINNER WITH PORTILLO
BBC Four, 10pm
Some pretty heated debate can be expected around Michael Portillo’s table tonight, as Dame Pauline Neville Jones, the former chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, joins the American author James Thackara, the US Embassy minister David T. Johnson and the marvellously monickered Stryker McGuire, Newsweek magazine’s man in London, to discuss George W. Bush’s legacy.
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ROB BRYDON’S ANNUALLY RETENTIVE
BBC Three, 10.30pm
Brydon’s amusing satire about the back-stabbing world of a comedy panel show fizzles out with a disappointing last episode. Gyles Brandreth steals the show, sending himself up royally as a name-dropping bore, but Rob’s sudden and crass attempt to derail the wedding plans of his guest booker, Sara, seems to have come out of nowhere.
THE LATE EDITION: LIVE FROM EDINBURGH
BBC Four, 10.30pm
Tonight and Thursday, Marcus Brigstocke rounds up the highs and lows of this year’s Fringe.