YORK MINSTER
BBC Two, 8pm
In an evening full of youth- orientated comedy and post-pub tomfoolery, this follow-up to BBC Two’s successful York Minster at Christmas provides an oasis of traditional Anglican calm. The first of six fly-on-the-chasuble visits to the largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe deals with the build-up to the Easter celebrations. The teenage choir rehearses a pretty new carol written by two of the clergy, nervous youngsters prepare for confirmation in the crypt, the junior choirmaster hides creme eggs for the Easter-egg hunt in his garden and Archbishop John Sentamu performs baptisms in an outdoor hot-tub. All seems good-humoured and well ordered, not a bit like Anthony Trollope, in fact, and the Minster itself looks fabulous.
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THE BEST OF THE WORST
Channel 4, 9.30pm
Rob Brydon’s recent Annually Retentive on BBC Three was such an effective satire on comedy panel shows that it must have taken some courage to go ahead with this one, where the panellists must ad lib humorously about examples of the worst this, that and the other. Hosted by Alexander Armstrong with team captains David Mitchell and Johnny Vaughan, it is probably funny enough not to feature in the top four worst comedy panel shows. The researchers have been busy digging up entertainingly weird material and Mitchell, Vaughan and their guests manage enough improvised riffs to raise a smile or two. This opener is worth watching just to see what happens to the streaker at a Burnley football match.
THE CHARLOTTE CHURCH SHOW
Channel 4, 10pm
The Cardiff warbler completes her conversion from voice of an angel to raunchy ladette with this mix of chat, scripted gags (inevitably, sheep feature in inappropriate contexts), celebrity guests and hidden camera stunts. In fact the recipe seems pretty similar to the The Friday Night Project with Church in the role of guest presenter, but on every week and doing her own songs. She appears as Dame Charlotte in a romantic novelist sketch lifted straight from Little Britain and the comedian Simon Greenall plays Jones, a cheesy compere. Only a few clips were available for preview, so it’s hard to know whether this will simply be car- crash TV. But if you like seeing an attractive young woman with a good voice acting the goat (sorry, sheep) it is a must-see.
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DA ALI G SHOW
Channel 4, 10.50pm
It’s business as usual as Sacha Baron Cohen and his alter egos, Borat from Kazakhstan, the über-camp Teutonic fashionista Bruno and Ali G himself, return to America for more close encounters of the puzzling kind. In the opening episode (first shown on E4 in 2004) Ali G accuses an ATF sniffer-dog trainer of canine racism before asking how long it takes his labradors to defuse the bombs once they have smelt them. Borat tries to taste fine wines with the Brotherhood of Knights of the Vine in Mississippi before getting out obscene Polaroids of his sister and Bruno gets down to details with a gay converter, Pastor Quinn. As ever, you never quite know which way the jokes will go.
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MULTICHANNEL CHOICE
By Angus Batey
LIVE TENNIS
Sky Sports Xtra, 4pm/ British Eurosport, 4.45pm
Continuing coverage from the US Open at Flushing Meadows, New York.
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LIVE PRO40 CRICKET
Sky Sports 2 (and HD), 4.30pm
With only eight games to play, teams can quickly get in to — or out of — trouble in this new 40-over cricket league. Durham can ease their relegation worries if they beat second-from- bottom Nottinghamshire at the Riverside.
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LIVE SUPER LEAGUE
Sky Sports 3, 7.30pm
Wigan will be looking for a win at home to Bradford as they aim to ease lingering relegation fears.
MEGASTRUCTURES
National Geographic, 8pm
The Tau Tona gold mine, in South Africa, is among the world’s deepest. Miners work some three miles beneath the earth’s surface. This programme looks at this excavated behemoth.
WHICKER’S WAR
History Channel, 9pm
By a stroke of good fortune, Alan Whicker’s time in uniform as a teenager was spent as he would spend so much of his later professional life, travelling through foreign lands with a film crew in tow. There, though, the similarities ended: his army film unit followed hot on the heels of the frontline troops, and they saw sights the globetrotting journalist would have found impossible to shoehorn into one of his dry travelogues, such as coming across the strung-up corpse of Benito Mussolini. He retraces his steps and looks back on these times, footage of his recent journey contrasting with that taken more than 60 years ago.
LEGENDS OF JAZZ
Artsworld, 9pm
This will be the jazz slot for the next month on Artsworld. The first profile is of Louis Armstrong, the New Orleans trumpeter who turned jazz from a regionally popular dance music into an art.
PLANET ROCK PROFILES
Performance, 9.30pm
This usually enjoyable series returns with an out-of-date portrait of Snow Patrol from 2004, charting their journey from workmanlike indie to corporate Coldplay facsimile. It features the bass player Mark McClelland, who left the band under a cloud shortly afterwards, and no mention is made of Iain Archer, the guitarist and songwriter who won an Ivor Novello Award for his work on their first hit album.
CSI: MIAMI
Living TV, 10pm
The clock is ticking in several senses as the third season of the Florida branch of the TV franchise reaches its climax. A dirty bomb is about to go off somewhere in Miami, and Horatio Caine (David Caruso) has found what appear to be the bloody fingerprints of his dead brother, Ray, during his investigation into the murder of the suspected bomb-maker. There are shocks a-plenty in this dark and elegant finale.