Viewing guide, by David Chater
Hospital
BBC Two, 9pm
To describe tonight’s episode as devastating would be an understatement. A particularly busy night in A&E at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, has left 30 people waiting for beds. “Clearly somebody needs to come in and somebody needs to go out,” says the A&E consultant Dr Stephen Metcalf. “So until someone leaves the hospital, you can’t admit anyone.” One of the biggest problems, though, is what is known as “delayed transfer of care”, whereby a patient is medically fit to leave but cannot be discharged because there is nowhere appropriate for them to go. So, for example, 91-year-old Dorothy is in hospital with a broken ankle and suffering from dizzy spells. It would be unsafe to send her home. She needs a temporary place in a care home, and since such places are in short supply she ends up remaining in hospital. “The NHS gets blamed quite a lot for problems in the community that are outside our remit and control,” says the consultant Dr David Shipway. And when St Mary’s is operating at full capacity, the knock-on effects are felt right across the hospital — including the 50 elective operations that take place every day. One exceptionally pleasant man — a retired software engineer called Peter Lai — has a massive aneurism filling up his lung and his operation will require no less than four consultant vascular surgeons, one cardiac surgeon, two perfusionists, three anaesthetists, one general surgeon and an expert nursing team. It has taken two months to co-ordinate the diaries of everyone involved, but the operation will have to be cancelled if no bed in the intensive care unit becomes available.
Midsomer Murders
ITV, 8pm
All is not well in Little-Plodding-Under-Water. It’s the annual Pet Show, which — for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t live within easy walking distance of a Costa Coffee — is a bit like a village fête, only with rabbits. It’s where all the top rabbit breeders congregate. Unfortunately a saboteur opens their cages, playing havoc with their owners’ careful breeding programme. And the next day, a body is found and Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail are covered in blood. “It’s all a little bit Alice in Wonderland,” says DS Winter (Neil Hendrix). Just a little bit.
James May: The Reassembler
BBC Four, 9pm
According to James May, there was a bleak period back in the time of his grandmother when teenagers had to listen to a gramophone disguised as a piece of furniture, while dad sucked on his pipe and mum did a tapestry. However, once the portable record player was invented, you could hide in the garage with it. “And before you knew it,” he says, “you had punk rock and cars were on fire in Paris. It was fantastic.” In a skilful and droll tribute to this technical revolution, he reassembles the 195 parts of a portable record player in his shed.
The Story of the Marshall Amp
BBC Four, 9.30pm
Jim Marshall, OBE (1923-2012), dubbed the “Father of Loud”, helped to create the sound of heavy rock with his invention of an amplifier powerful enough to generate high-quality sound that could fill a stadium and reach the back of the farthest festival field. His Marshall amps became a ubiquitous part of the musical scenery in the 1960s and have remained so ever since. This entertaining documentary, first shown in 2014, is essential viewing for rock fans, balancing anecdotal evidence on the effectiveness of Marshall’s invention from musicians with technical discussion of the amp’s evolution. Joe Clay
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Britain’s Benefit Tenants
Channel 4, 10pm
House prices continue to rise and the availability of social housing has plummeted to an all-time low. As a result, Britain’s two million private landlords have been filling the gap and more benefit tenants than ever before are renting privately. Between the landlords and tenants a new breed of letting agent has sprung up. In Hull, one such agent is on the trail of a tenant who has done £1,000 of damage and stolen the curtains, while in Grimsby another agent is after a tenant who — although he cleaned up the property — still owes £3,000 in rent arrears.
Catch-up TV, by David Chater
Yellowstone: Wildest Winter to Blazing Summer
BBC iPlayer, to February 2
In a three-part series, Kate Humble gets to grips with the Great Yellowstone Ecosystem, an area the size of Scotland, which includes two national parks. Because of its elevated position and the horseshoe shape of the surrounding mountains, the cold air from the north and the moisture from the Pacific Ocean get trapped, resulting in prolonged periods of extreme weather. That is the selling point of the series, which sets out to explain how those extremes — from minus 40C in the winter to 40C degrees in the summer — affect the wildlife, including the owls and the poor old grizzly bears, who are waking up early from their hibernation, not knowing if they’re coming or going.
Film choice, by Wendy Ide
The Wonders (15, 2014)
Sky Cinema Premiere, 10pm
The Wonders, the highly personal second feature by the Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher, is a beguilingly odd little coming-of-age tale set on the isolated farmstead of a family of beekeepers. The oldest of four daughters, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) is her cantankerous father’s right hand; she is quietly confident on all things honey-related. The rhythm of their long summer days is disrupted with the arrival of a troubled young German delinquent and a film crew shooting a cheesy talent show. Monica Bellucci is an arch diversion as the exotic host of the TV show. The storytelling is fragmented, a little distracted, but the effect is as richly potent as the golden honey that is the life force for Gelsomina and her family. (111min)
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What Doesn’t Kill You (15, 2008)
BBC One, 11.45pm
This is Boston Crime Drama 101. There’s a pair of Irish-American brothers, both hoodlums, one trying to stay on the straight and narrow, the other a ne’er-do-well. Scenes take place in smoke-filled, though patron-light bars. One character is called “Paulie”. It’s snowing. What makes this one different is that it is based on the true story of the writer-director Brian Goodman, and it features two absorbing and visceral performances from Ethan Hawke (Paulie, ne’er-do-well) and Mark Ruffalo (Brian, straight and narrow). Goodman doesn’t romanticise the mean streets of south Boston (although he does sentimentalise them somewhat), while the grey, washed-out palette suggests a city paved with not very much at all. Formulaic, but done to perfection. (100min) Chris Bennion
No (15, 2012)
Film4, 1.40am
The final film in Pablo Larrain’s loose trilogy dealing with Chile during the Pinochet years, No is part political thriller, part a snapshot of the moment when politics stopped being about ideology and started being about salesmanship. In 1988, after 15 years of General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, the people of Chile were given the opportunity to vote in a national plebiscite on whether the general should be allowed to continue in power. René (Gael García Bernal) is the advertising whizz-kid who is brought in to mastermind the “No” campaign, which he does by selling the people “happiness”. As the campaign unfolds and it becomes clear that René has tapped into something in the national psyche, the general’s junta responds with police crackdowns and heavy-handed menace. Sharp-witted and satisfying. (118min)
Radio choice, by Catherine Nixey
The Documentary: Trump Tweet By Tweet
World Service, 7.30pm
Donald Trump has called it his “beautiful Twitter” account — but what does it tell us about the man who is about to become the next president of the United States of America? For one thing, it tells us that he can certainly find his way to the caps-lock button: he declared on it recently that he was going to “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Thank heavens for that. His tweets also offer reminders, should we need them, of his magisterial political correctness. As one of his more thoughtful declared: “While @BetteMidler is an extremely unattractive woman, I refuse to say that because I always insist on being politically correct.” What a gent. Here, the BBC presenter Katty Kay picks her way through some of his finest aperçus and asks what they really say about the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world.
Radio 3 in Concert
Radio 3, 7.30pm
Apparently, when Domenico Scarlatti met Handel the two engaged in a harpsichord duel. Scarlatti won, although he admired Handel so much that, whenever he mentioned his name, he used to cross himself. This concert focuses largely on the work of his father, Alessandro, who wrote in a period when instrumental music was not yet considered important. That didn’t stop the Scarlattis writing some nice stuff, performed in this concert by La Serenissima. The programme includes Domenico’s Sinfonia in A. Adrian Chandler directs from the violin; Martin Handley presents.