Wednesday’s TV: what to watch tonight

Eat to Live Forever with Giles Coren
BBC Two, 9pm
On Tuesday night (BBC Two, 8pm), Giles Coren tortured an innocent family by encouraging them to swallow some of the most disgusting food ever seen on television. Tonight it’s his turn. In a refreshingly sincere and personal programme, The Times’s restaurant critic investigates three extreme diets in the hope of living longer. His father Alan died at the age of 69 and 45-year-old Giles is now the father of two very small children. “It makes me sad every day,” he says, “that my father never met them.” The first diet designed to increase longevity involves near-starvation and whose devotees promise “some extraordinary things will begin to happen. Some really extraordinary things”. Which is true, but not in a good way. The second is the Stone Age diet consisting only of food that would have been hunted, fished or gathered by our Palaeolithic ancestors. Essentially it consists of meat, salad and nuts served up with evangelical fervour and a catchy slogan: “Become a fat-burning beast!” And the third is a regime of nothing but fruit that seems to be followed largely by young people high on youth. Coren never sneers or guffaws; he remains polite and open-minded in the face of extreme provocation and — at the very end of the programme — he finds the answer to his quest from a 113-year-old man from Phoenix, Arizona.

Three in a Bed
Channel 4, 8pm
It’s the return of the series that comes from the same gene pool as Wife Swap, Come Dine with Me and How Clean Is Your House? Three lots of people who run B&Bs in different parts of the country stay in one another’s establishments. As with Wife Swap, they have been cynically chosen to be as different as different can be, and they set about picking holes in the rival establishment before paying whatever they deem to be a fair price for their stay. The first episode features visits Norfolk House B&B in Newmarket, Suffolk; Cromwell Arms Pub with Rooms in Romsey, Hampshire; and Full Circle Yurts in the Lake District, whose owner is so at one with nature that he never wears shoes.

The Billion Dollar Chicken Shop
BBC One, 9pm
It was brave of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s management to allow this three-part, access-all-areas series to be made. After all, not many of its 850 KFC outlets are attractive; many of its 24,000 employees are on minimum wage, and factory chicken farming — whichever way you look at it — is about as disgusting as it gets. For all that, the company seems to have many qualities. The staff who appear in this programme are a cheerful, dedicated and likeable bunch and the company has an admirable culture of recognition and praise. Even so, when one of the head chefs is asked how he feels about handling raw chicken all day, he says: “I used to be an undertaker so I’m used to handling gruesome things.”

DCI Banks
ITV, 9pm
Another day, another double murder. These particular deaths may be honour killings, but the two victims were shot whereas most honour killings take place in the home using weapons to hand. “It’s too easy,” we are told, “to see a dead Muslim and shout honour killing.” On the other hand, they could be related to an unscrupulous debt collector. “You rob a bank, a jewellery store, I can sort of understand that, ” says DCI Banks (Stephen Tompkinson). “But targeting people who don’t have anything to begin with . . . ” Meanwhile DCI Banks’s father (Keith Barron) is losing the plot and the private life of DI Helen Morton (Caroline Catz) has taken a mysterious turn.

24 Hours in A&E
Channel 4, 9pm
Every time you think this long-running series has nothing left to offer, it focuses on people whose intensity of love would leave even the most cynical viewer open-mouthed and speechless. A 63-year-old man from Iraq who has been diagnosed with throat cancer is rushed into hospital following a sudden bleed. He and his wife fell in love at first sight in Iraq and had a secret love affair. Together they lived through any amount of hardship . . . and now this. “It breaks your heart,” she says, “to see your loved one — a kind-hearted person who has always been there for you — to see him in this situation. It’s heartbreaking, really. I don’t wish it even for my enemy.”

My Self-Harm Nightmare
Channel 4, 11pm
Eating disorders and self-harming among young people are on the increase. According to the charity YoungMinds, one in 12 people self-harm and the number of young people seeking help for an eating disorder more than doubled between 2011 and 2013. Experts believe this could be connected to the proliferation of websites made by young people that encourage their users to compete to lose more weight, share pictures of themselves, post comments and glorify their own self-harm. These sites include images of emaciated bodies alongside tips and tricks on how people can make themselves vomit or hide their scars from parents. In this desperate programme, three young women drawn into this online world talk about their experiences.

Film choice by Wendy Ide

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
ITV2, 10pm
David Fincher directs this English language adaptation of the best-selling Swedish novel; Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara star as, respectively, disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist and pierced, tattooed computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. The pair find themselves working together on the case of a young woman, the niece of a wealthy industrialist, who disappeared forty years before. What they uncover is a web of perversity and corruption that even the jaded Blomkvist couldn’t have anticipated. Fincher’s approach is characteristically dark — he has a tendency to hover, obsessively, over the grubbier details of the plot. But there is no question that this is an expertly constructed thriller. Whether it’s as good as the Swedish original is another matter entirely. (158min)

Control (2007, b/w)
Channel 4, 12.55am
Decades spent documenting the egos, excesses and emotional fragility of the world of rock music stood Anton Corbijn in good stead with his directorial debut. His subject here is Ian Curtis, the troubled singer who gave voice to his demons as the haunted, hollow-eyed front man for Joy Division, but who succumbed to them at the tragically early age of 23. Expressively shot in black and white, the film lends an understated beauty to the Victorian backstreets of Macclesfield. We’re introduced to the singer (played with conviction by Sam Riley) as a teenager with a poe’s soul, hunched in his bedroom, barricaded against the world outside. Somehow the introvert flowers enough to win the heart of Debbie (Samantha Morton), and to talk his way into the band that will become Joy Division. Riley evokes Curtis’s tortured, spasmodic stage presence uncannily. (122min)

Radio choice by Catherine Nixey

Drama: Dot
Radio 4, 11.30am
Little chills the blood so much as the phrase “new Radio 4 comedy”. But, gentle reader, be un-chilled. Fenella Woolgar plays Dot, who works in the Cabinet War Rooms, discovers that a spy is working there too, and decides to unmask him. Because, as she puts it, nothing is too much trouble when it comes to “king and country, White Cliffs; correct use of cutlery; protecting shiny Cockney children from Jerry”. There are occasional awkward moments, but on the whole, a lovely period-mocking script is delivered with its eyebrow at precisely the right level of archness. It also manages to get in some beautiful prods at radio play tropes. “As you can see, I’m beginning to narrow my eyes at you”, etc.

Simon Mayo
Radio 2, 5pm
An intriguing combination this: Simon Mayo’s guest on Drivetime today is none other than the best-selling author Barbara Taylor Bradford. At the age of 81, Bradford is on to talk about her latest book, The Cavendon Woman. Set in 1926 in Cavendon Hall, a grand house in Yorkshire, whose dramatis personae includes Cecily Swann (“forging a path as a fashion designer in London”), and Dulcie, “the outspoken debutante”.