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Murder
BBC Two, 9pm
Birger Larsen, the director behind the Danish series The Killing, is back with three new episodes of Murder. The original production won the Bafta Award for Best Single Drama in 2013, and here Larsen is reunited with Robert Jones, the writer responsible for one of the best police dramas yet made for television, The Cops. This is a series with serious form. In the first episode tonight, the body of Rafe Carey (Frank Gilhooley) is washed up in the River Tweed. By all accounts he was a decent man. “I grew up with my brother’s arm around my shoulders,” says his sister (Shauna Macdonald). “If I’m honest, no man has ever matched him.” Her husband (Peter McDonald) is the prime suspect, not just because of run-of-the-mill family jealousy, but because their seven-year-old daughter died suddenly of meningitis while they were away in Rome, and Rafe’s family were taking care of her. At the same time, the young detective investigating the case (Morven Christie) has issues of her own. She was an exemplary officer until a close friend was killed in a hit-and-run. All in all, it is a prime example of one of life’s messiest messes. What makes the drama so exceptional, though, is the way that the story is told, with all the characters addressing the camera directly as if they were appearing in a documentary, giving their version of events and creating a narrative out of a patchwork of different perspectives. It avoids all the clichés of the standard police procedural — and that is why the original won the Bafta.
Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed
BBC One, 9pm
Mary Beard visits Pompeii, which is in the throes of a €100 million (£80 million) restoration scheme. A CT scanner examines the famous plaster casts and reveals the condition of the teeth, the skeletal structure and the age of the victims. Technicians create an accurate 3D view of Pompeii using laser-mapping technology. Beard is shown restored mosaics and frescoes, and taken inside store rooms packed with artefacts ranging from paint pots and foodstuffs to plumbing fittings and fishing nets. The programme sets out to show not how the Pompeiians died, but how they lived.
Bear Grylls: Mission Survive
ITV, 9pm
Seven more celebrities are tortured by Bear Grylls, this time on a 12-day expedition across southern Africa. “This journey,” we are told, “is the toughest Bear has ever set . . .” The seven hapless victims are actors Samantha Barks, Michelle Collins, Chelsee Healey and Neil Morrissey. There is the Dancing on Ice judge Jason Gardiner, the former England football coach Stuart Pearce and footballer Alex Scott. They will be hungry, sleep-deprived and subjected to extremes of temperature, and at the end of every episode Grylls will send home the one who whinges the most. “Dig deep — or die,” he says.
Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle
BBC Two, 10pm
Stewart Lee despises entertainment. He does not pander to the audience (“a load of horrible, ignorant snobs”). He doesn’t even like the people who like him. (James Corden, apparently, is a big fan. “Imagine James Corden watching me,” says Lee. “It’s like a dog listening to classical music.”) He compares each series to a suicide note and he sympathises with prostitutes. “I know what it’s like to provide people with a service they crave, and yet to be despised for it.” He is Britain’s mordant answer to Bill Hicks — and no comedian could improve on that.
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Thicker Than Water
More4, 10pm
A massive success on primetime Swedish television, Thicker Than Water casts an hypnotic spell from the very first of its ten episodes. A matriarch who runs an old-fashioned hotel with her youngest son on an island in the Swedish archipelago summons her two other estranged children to the island out of the blue. “I’m fixing what’s broken,” she says. All had a deeply dysfunctional upbringing, and to each she gives a piece of advice — almost like a riddle — before leaving them to their own devices. Imagine Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None re-worked by Ingmar Bergman.
Catch-up TV by Joe Clay
Walking the Himalayas
All4, available now
The former Parachute Regiment officer Levison Wood followed up his year-long quest to walk the length of the River Nile (a trek so gruelling that a journalist who accompanied him for a stretch died from heatstroke) with an attempt to walk the length of the Himalayas, from Afghanistan to Bhutan. This trip proved equally arduous, with a near-death experience for Wood when the car he was travelling in plunged 150m off a cliff in Nepal. After recovering, he immediately returned to complete his mission. Brushes with danger are commonplace for the ex-platoon commander, who served in Afghanistan and has travelled through many of the world’s danger zones, and they make for gripping television over the course of this five-part series.
Films of the day
Hell in the Pacific (PG, 1969)
Film4, 4.45pm
This stark military fable from the director John Boorman stars Lee Marvin and Toshirô Mifune as enemy combatants thrown together on a Pacific island during the Second World War. After a series of hostile showdowns, their need for mutual survival creates a grudging bond and they join forces to plot their escape. Beautifully shot by the cinematographer Conrad Hall, Hell in the Pacific is a pointed anti-war allegory with virtually no dialogue. Marvin and Mifune served in the Pacific during the war — Marvin was a US Marine, who received the Purple Heart during the Battle of Saipan in 1943, while Mifune served in the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service. (103min) Stephen Dalton
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Olympus Has Fallen (15, 2013)
Channel 5, 9pm
Antoine Fuqua directs this big, swaggering action spectacular. It’s clear he’s more concerned about getting maximum bang for his buck than he is about subtleties such as narrative logic and nuanced characterisation. Gerard Butler stars as Mike Banning, a disgraced former presidential guard. Banning no longer works for the president (Aaron Eckhart) after he failed to save the First Lady after a car crash, the fact that he plucked the president from certain death notwithstanding. More than a year later, North Korean terrorists manage to invade the White House and take the president hostage. It’s up to Banning to save the day. Support comes from Morgan Freeman, as the speaker of the house, and Angela Bassett, as the director of the Secret Service. (119min) Wendy Ide
Chatroom (15, 2010)
Film4, 1.55am
The cult Japanese horror director Hideo Nakata takes the helm of a British teen thriller set in cyberspace. The screenplay was adapted by Enda Walsh (who penned the excellent Hunger) from his own play, and the film employs one interesting device. Instead of depicting the “chat” with lots of tedious shots of computer screens and emoticons, Nakata envisages the internet as a slightly Lynchian hotel, shot in super-saturated colours. Each chatroom is represented by an actual room, in which “chat” takes place. The production design team has clearly been working overtime creating stylised interpretations of web phenomena. Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as charismatic but troubled teen William, who creates his own chatroom with the sole intention of messing with the heads and lives of those who enter. (97min) WI
Radio choice by John Bungey
Susan Calman: Keep Calman Carry On
Radio 4, 6.30pm
The Scottish comic’s gently amusing series is inspired by the idea that she can’t relax and needs a hobby. Her chums are then tasked with persuading her of the merits of their favourite pursuits. She’s tried hill-walking with Muriel Gray, watching cricket with Andy Zaltzman, and today it’s the Cabin Pressure writer John Finnemore who tries to persuade her of the benefits of a surprise holiday. Calman says her mini-breaks usually involve a laminated itinerary and is appalled when the envelope of instructions that Finnemore presents her with turns out to be an empty sheet of paper. Anyway, their trip takes them to a fine old English city not too far from London (remember this is a Radio 4 budget), for a day that includes poring over medieval manuscripts, a happy hour in a board games café and some gentle punting (a bit of a clue there).
America’s Angry Cowboys
World Service, 7.30pm
2016 is no time to be a cowboy in America. For Assignment, Neal Razzell travels to Oregon to investigate a quarrel that is fuelling a debate about what it means to be an American. The armed occupation of a wildlife refuge in the state highlighted a deepening land dispute between rural communities and the federal government in Washington DC, which owns huge tracts of isolated and scenic territory. Ranchers say the land should be open for them to graze cattle and argue that a historic way of life is doomed.