What’s on TV and radio tonight: Friday, April 9

For full TV listings for the week, see thetimes.co.uk/tvplanner

Viewing guide, by Dominic Maxwell

Churchill
Channel 5, 9pm
“This time,” announces Channel 5’s six-part overview of Winston Churchill as this third instalment heads towards the Second World War, “we will follow the remarkable story of how a political has-been makes one of the greatest comebacks of all time.” Which would be horrible hyperbole in almost any context except this. Instead, this shows Churchill becoming the bloody-minded wartime leader who lives on in popular memory. It shows him returning from the sidelines to become a prime minister who, unlike some of his cabinet colleagues as Hitler rampages through France, resolutely refuses to surrender. Not that this series is blind to his complexities or, less politely, his flaws: he was “an old-school imperialist” whose “die-hard attitude on India” damaged his career. It shows us how he bought Chartwell, his retreat in Kent, against the wishes of his wife, Clemmie. Mostly though, this is the story of how he gained power, joining the war cabinet and finally replacing Neville Chamberlain in No 10. Yes this is a familiar story, retold through interviews with unseen historians while period or modern footage tries to keep your eyes interested. If you have a pile of Antony Beevor books by your bedside, this overview may be too basic for you, lucid and informative though it is. Yet if you want a lot of history in a single hour, this does a fine job. It ends with the retreat from Dunkirk and the “we shall fight on the beaches” speech, which was typed out in a blank verse format to encourage the dynamic rhythm in its delivery, that followed it in June 1940.

Them
Amazon Prime
All ten episodes of this new anthology series by the writer-producer Little Marvin land today, with a second season already ordered (different setting and cast, same idea of putting marginalised characters in a horror context). This first one, Covenant, follows a black family, the Emorys, who move from North Carolina to super-suburban Compton in Los Angeles in 1953. They have to deal with supernatural goings-on and heinously racist neighbours. It’s slow to get started, but there are secrets to unearth and strong turns from Deborah Ayorinde and Ashley Thomas as the parents.

World’s Most Scenic River Journeys
Channel 5, 8pm
Channel 5’s weekly river trip, distinguished by the narration of Bill Nighy, arrives in Germany to journey down the Moselle river, from the Roman city of Trier to where the river flows into the Rhine at Koblenz. The Moselle tends to be described as one of Europe’s most romantic rivers. But it’s also a working one and the commercial barges can be as long as a football pitch. Inevitably, the region’s wines also feature with a trip down into the cellars under the town of Traben-Trarbach, before things meander to the fairytale Cochem castle.

Trip Hazard: My Great British Adventure
Channel 4, 8.30pm
What part of the television travel-show landscape is left for comedians still to conquer? Happily this vehicle for Rosie Jones scores with its pace and self-awareness: “You’re very good for us,” a mock Channel 4 commissioner tells Jones, “you tick a lot of boxes: woman, disabled, gay, northern.” This week’s celebrity guest, Scarlett Moffatt, joins Jones as they wang around the Lake District visiting William Wordsworth’s cottage, re-enacting a Viking raid and, whoops, breaking an antique sausage-making machine. Olivia Colman narrates.

Catch-up TV, by Joe Clay

Indian Summers
Britbox
Both series of the Channel 4 drama, set in India during the final years of British colonial rule, are available on Britbox. Back then a few thousand British civil servants ran an entire subcontinent and every summer, they escaped the heat to govern from Simla, the summer capital of the British Raj, situated in the foothills of the Himalayas. The focus is on three sets of siblings, including Ralph Whelan (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), private secretary to the viceroy, and his sister, Alice (Jemima West), but the jewel in the crown — pun intended — is Julie Walters as Cynthia Coffin, the proprietor of the exclusively white Royal Simla Club. Cynthia is the hostess with the mostes’ and a Machiavellian streak; a part Walters plays with relish.

Film choice

Suffragette (12, 2015)
Film4, 6.50pm
Emmeline Pankhurst is played here in all her eminence by Meryl Streep, but the real star is Carey Mulligan as a London laundry worker who becomes a political figure. Mulligan plays Maud Watts, a young woman rubbed so raw by life that she fights for a cause she never intended to embrace. Here, universal suffrage is not about the sashes of the upper classes but rather about a working-class woman with inequality eating into her soul. Later on, with the bombing of Lloyd George’s summerhouse and the Epsom Derby horse race finale, the story takes on a terrible momentum, and Maud’s tale is as moving as it is inspiring. Helen Pankhurst, the great-granddaughter of Emmeline, and her daughter Laura have small roles in the film. (106min) Kate Muir

War of the Worlds (12, 2005)
BBC1, 11.35pm
HG Wells’s alien-invasion story is beefed up and pumped full of steroids and explosives by Steven Spielberg’s big-budget adaptation. Tom Cruise stars as the average Joe battling to save his family in the face of what looks like the end of humanity. This superior popcorn flick revels in the unabashed joy of blowing stuff into oblivion. The special effects are tremendous, from the first sight of the tripod alien machines as they stalk through the wreckage of the city, to the burning express train that screams past the stunned survivors as if it has escaped from hell. Particularly effective is the sound design; the bellowing rumble from the alien ships chills the blood. As does Dakota Fanning’s incessant screaming. (106min) Wendy Ide

Radio choice, by Debra Craine

CrowdScience: Why Do We Gossip?
BBC World Service, 8.32pm
Who doesn’t love a good gossip? Apparently we spend about 60 per cent of our conversations sharing information about the scandalous behaviour of others. It might even explain our social media-fuelled obsession with the intimate lives of celebrities. The CrowdScience presenter Datshiane Navanayagam meets a scientist who views gossip as a key evolutionary adaptation — a way of bonding and establishing acceptable group behaviour. She also discovers what kind of information we are most keen to share and if there is such a thing as good gossip and bad gossip.