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Born to Be Different
Channel 4, 9pm
For the past 15 years, the programme-makers have been following six children whose lives have been shaped by disability. In tonight’s programme, they are reunited in the Hampshire countryside as they approach their 16th birthdays. Like Michael Apted’s Up series, which is one of the crowning glories of television, it offers the unique privilege of being able to see lives fast-forwarded in front of our eyes. The children are a fabulous bunch and the love of their parents is absolute, constant and uncompromising. The series certainly does not sugar-coat disability, but it gives the lie to any murmuring that disability is an unqualified misfortune. Shelbie, for example, has a chromosome disorder that has left her severely physically and mentally disabled. Her life has been a constant battle for survival, and yet her mother remains as devoted and determined as ever. “I can’t imagine life without her,” she says. “She’s the centre of our world. She’s the centre of this family.” All the parents in the series are united by a strength of character that, if they didn’t have it before, they quickly developed. As well as the everyday demands of caring for a disabled child, they often have to battle to get necessary drugs and treatment or find a place in an appropriate school. And yet when you see Zoe (who has undergone six serious operations on her arms and legs) in the running to become head girl at her school or William (who has the mental age of a toddler) expressing his love for a girl at school, you realise why programmes like this are such a powerful force for good.
Back in Time for the Weekend
BBC Two, 8pm
How well do you remember the 1990s? Can you still hear the Nasa-like sound of internet dial-up buzzing and whirring in your ears? It was the dawning of the age of Ikea when taste was democratised, Sunday trading was introduced and shopping turned into a leisure pursuit. Cheap mobile phones flooded the market. Electronic gadgets became disposable. There were satellite dishes, Game Boys and makeover shows. Twenty-two million people watched the first National Lottery draw, Apple introduced the first truly beautiful computer and thousands of people bought gym memberships they didn’t use. The past suddenly feels familiar.
Happy Valley
BBC One, 9pm
Sally Wainwright’s series has plenty of the clichés of the television thriller. There is a serial killer on the loose, another murderer is sweating with guilt and the fear of discovery, and a snarling psychopath is plotting his diabolical revenge from behind bars. And yet this hackneyed structure delivers moments of startling truth and any number of wonderful performances. In one of many such moments, there is a scene when Sarah Lancashire’s police sergeant listens with total empathy to a 19-year-old girl who has been attacked, and afterwards lays into the two police officers who failed to take the girl seriously.
The Last Seabird Summer?
BBC Four, 9pm
In 1937, while still an undergraduate at Oxford, Nigel Nicolson bought the tiny Shiant Isles in the Outer Hebrides for £1,400 with money his grandmother had left him. He gave them to his son Adam on his 21st birthday, who went on to write the definitive book on the islands, Sea Room. The isles are home to tens of thousands of puffins, common guillemots, razorbills, northern fulmars, black-legged kittiwakes, common shags, gulls and great skuas. Tragically, their numbers are in steep decline — 40 per cent of seabirds have been lost in Scotland alone — and Adam sets out to discover why.
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He Named Me Malala
National Geographic, 9pm
The Oscar-winning film-maker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) spent 18 months in the company of the teenage human rights activist and Nobel peace prizewinner Malala Yousafzai. But instead of a sombre re-examination of her place within the Middle Eastern quagmire, Guggenheim delivers a most unlikely tearjerker. He throws the entire cinematic trick-bag at the screen: animated backstory, nightmarish Taliban montages, plus the regular use of disembodied voices instead of talking heads. The result is part portrait, part feminist rallying cry and part parental love letter. Just remember to bring your hanky. Kevin Maher
Catch-up TV
Our World War
BBC iPlayer, available until Aug 14
A happy by-product of BBC Three’s move online is that box sets of many of its big hitters, including The Mighty Boosh,Little Britain and In the Flesh, are available to watch on iPlayer. Among its finest commissions was the extraordinary dramatised documentary series Our World War, screened to mark the centenary of the First World War. It employed the same vérité techniques as the award-winning Our War to re-create the fighting of the Great War based on first-hand accounts from the Royal Fusiliers, who, in the first British engagement of the First World War, failed to hold the Belgian town of Mons. It does much to blow away the fog of the past and provides an immediate, visceral view of the fighting in all its chaos and desperation. David Chater
Films of the day
True Grit (PG, 1969)
Film4, 4.25pm
One of the stand-out films of John Wayne’s autumnal years, the director Henry Hathaway’s unorthodox western earned The Duke his only Oscar and spawned a 1975 sequel, Rooster Cogburn. Wayne plays a bluff old gunslinger who almost meets his match when Kim Darby’s wily young charmer recruits him for a missing person hunt. Mia Farrow was originally cast in Darby’s role, but pulled out after her failed bid to replace Hathaway with the Rosemary’s Baby director Roman Polanski. The theme tune, by Elmer Bernstein and Don Black, was also Oscar-nominated. (128min) Stephen Dalton
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Shutter Island (15, 2010)
Film 4, 10.55pm
Shutter Island is a pitch-dark thriller that morphs, some two hours in, into another film altogether. From the moment a US Marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) vomits on the ferry to the island asylum for the criminally insane, you know that the director Martin Scorsese has opened the noir-film casket. Thus, what seems to be a police investigation of the disappearance of a woman prisoner who has drowned her three children, ends up dredging up much deeper horrors. Under DiCaprio’s fedora, raincoat and swagger lies a damaged man who was present at the liberation of a concentration camp and whose wife has died in an arsonist’s fire. This adds to the claustrophobic dread in the air, as a hurricane comes in and seals off the island from the outside world. The twist at the finish is both brilliant and irritating, in a film that could have lost 30 minutes without any ill effects. (138min) Kate Muir
This Boy’s Life (15, 1993)
Film4, 1.35am
Based on an autobiographical book by Tobias Wolff, and directed by Michael Caton-Jones, this is a noteworthy period drama that features a stellar central performance from a very young Leonardo DiCaprio. He plays Toby, the troublesome son of Caroline (Ellen Barkin). Caroline is a drifter who dreams of meeting a good man to solve all her problems and be a father to her wilful boy. And at first, Dwight (Robert De Niro) seems to fit the bill. But Dwight wants to mould his new stepson into a better person and his methods are draconian. Toby chafes under the emotional and physical abuse that is meted out in the name of discipline. The whole picture is saturated in evocative period details of 1950s smalltown America. (120min) WI
Radio choice by John Bungey
The Museum of Lost Objects
Radio 4, 12.04pm
Wars don’t just kill people, they destroy history too. Over two weeks this series looks at antiquities and cultural sites lost during the wars in Iraq and Syria. Isis’s destruction of much of the ancient city of Palmyra was the most shocking of such acts last year. A settlement for 4,000 years, at Palmyra’s centre was the Temple of Bel, a shrine to a motley collection of Greco-Roman and local gods. Its design mixed the cultures of East and West — a blend completely unacceptable to Islamic fundamentalists. When Isis forces neared the city last spring, Khaled al-Asaad, the 82-year-old keeper of antiquities, refused to leave with his family. His daughter, Zenobia, tells of his execution — he was reciting the Koran loudly, much to the annoyance of his killers. She adds that she can never return to a site forever linked with his death.
Incarnations
Radio 4, 2.45pm
The series promising “India told in 50 lives” moves on to the great Bengali writer, musician and thinker Rabindranath Tagore. He was the first Asian winner of the Nobel prize — for literature — in 1913 and is in people’s minds today as campaigners try to get same-sex relationships decriminalised. Tagore grew up amid the clamour for nationalism, but he believed that freedom from the colonial oppressors was only secondary to personal freedom. That meant an end to religious, caste and patriarchal bondage — and a fairer deal for women.