HOW CLEAN IS YOUR HOUSE?/ YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
Channel 4, 8pm/8.30pm
Kim Woodburn, Aggie MacKenzie and Gillian McKeith are all strong candidates for TVs Bossiest Female Lifestyle Advisers, and their shows are among the most personally intrusive. Therein, of course, lies the pleasure. For their new series opener Kim and Aggie visit the farm of two refugees from city life, Ann and Adam Massingham, and find their house so cluttered and filthy that it looks like a fermenting environmental health hazard. Meanwhile, on You Are What You Eat, Ms McKeith finds another dangerously overweight family to harass. There is something unworthily reassuring about seeing people whose clutter or weight problems are so extreme.
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WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
BBC One, 9pm
Since Bill Oddie opened the first series of this surprise hit, with its mix of pungent social history and moving personal stories, on BBC Two, there has been a national surge in ancestor tracing. Series two had Jeremy Paxman reduced to tears. Now on BBC One, series three opens with the correspondingly populist Barbara Windsor as its first subject. The Carry On and EastEnders star is preoccupied by the tensions between her relatively genteel mother’s side of the family and the rough-and-ready costermongers on her father’s. She duly finds the cockney roots she desires but, as ever, this is only the beginning of a journey that takes her to Ireland during the potato famine, rural Suffolk and a surprise artistic connection.
THE ONLY BOY FOR ME
ITV1, 9pm
After a gap of several years (having children), Cold Feet’s Helen Baxendale returns to our small screens in this harmless, if fundamentally soppy, drama. Annie, a professional single mother, is raising the likeable but possessive young Charlie when she falls for a smoothie-chops divorcé Mack (Patrick Baladi). Things chug along light- heartedly featuring mildly dotty grandparents and colleagues, and contrasting the eccentricities of English village life with high-pressure Manhattan business culture, until Annie is faced with a life-changing decision. Which way will she jump? Will anyone care? Faced with a drama that could be prescribed as a mild sedative, will anyone still be awake?
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9/11 MILLIONAIRE WIDOWS
Channel 4, 9pm
This programme may prove to be the most unexpected twist in Channel 4’s season of documentaries marking the fifth anniversary of the attack on the twin towers. Billions of dollars in compensation were given to the relatives of victims of the attack, it seems, and some grieving widows became multimillionaires overnight. Apparently the strains of bereavement, followed by the equivalent of a lottery win and pressure from families, have been particularly destructive for some. Others have been attacked for flaunting their new wealth. Payments were made only on condition that relatives waived the right to sue for compensation, and in a strange compounding of misery, others are plagued by the feeling that they allowed themselves to be bought off.
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MULTICHANNEL CHOICE
By Angus Batey
LIVE INTERNATIONAL FOOTBALL
Sky Sports 3, from 4pm/ Sky Sports 1, from 5pm
Scotland and England play their second European Championship qualifiers today, but there are other matches on offer too. First up is Russia v Croatia (SS3, 4pm), with Lithuania v Scotland (SS1, 5pm) and Macedonia v England (SS1, 7.30pm) following before the meeting of two past winners, France and Italy (SS3 8pm), completes the line-up.
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GALLERY TOURS
Artsworld, 8pm
A new series looking at some of the world’s most famous art houses begins with a tour of the Saatchi Gallery’s former premises in what was once County Hall, in London. Sadly, a dispute with the building’s owners forced the Saatchi collection to leave the building shortly thereafter.
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PHILBY, BURGESS AND MACLEAN/ESCAPE: KIM PHILBY
BBC Four, 9pm/10.25pm
Another look at the Cambridge spy ring. The first of these two dramas was written by Ian Curteis and made in 1977, before Anthony Blunt’s treachery was exposed: it stars Derek Jacobi as Burgess and Arthur Lowe as Herbert Morrison. The second, from 1980, looks at Philby’s defection to the USSR.
BAGHDAD ER/GUNNER PALACE
More4, 9pm/10.15pm
The final two films of this Iraq War season focus on the US troops mired in the conflict. Baghdad ER looks at the 86th Combat Support Hospital, based in the Iraqi capital’s Green Zone. It is not for the squeamish — in the first minute, a medic is seen dumping a severed arm in a bin — but it provides a forceful reminder of the risks troops run while fighting an evermore inglorious war.
Gunner Palace, made in 2003, follows Americans billeted in one of Uday Hussein’s bombed-out palaces. It is hard not to feel for these confused young people, sent to an alien land they do not understand and who turn to junk food and rap music to make sense of it all. But the brutalising effect of their presence is plain to see, even with the insurgency in its infancy. For every “heart and mind” won, another suspect is sent to Abu Ghraib on suspicion, not evidence.
PRINCESS NIKKI
E4, 10pm
It must be hectic being the Big Brother loser Nikki Grahame. When she is not being photographed by the tabloids out on the razz with her boyfriend, the show’s winner, Pete Bennett, or being interviewed by celebrity magazines, she has somehow managed to find the time to film this new series. The premise is that the dizzy blonde, infamous in the house for her inability to cope with even the slightest discomfort, has to undertake jobs she will surely throw a fit over. Tonight, she heads out in to the Channel on a trawler to catch fish, then sells them in a chip shop.
THE LAST DETECTIVE
ITV3, 10.10pm
Peter Davison and Sean Hughes star in another droll murder mystery.