For full TV listings for the week, see our comprehensive TV guide
Viewing guide, by Toby Earle
Things You Should Have Done
BBC3, 9pm/9.30pm
In the very first minute of this new comedy its entire attitude and direction is established: Lucia, a self-described “stay-at-home daughter”, is informed by police that her parents have been involved in a car crash and have “passed on”. She pauses, then asks, “Do you know if they’re all right?” Lucia is played by Lucia Keskin, who featured in Channel 4’s Big Boys and Dave’s Sneakerhead, and she’s also the show’s writer and creator. As with last year’s BBC comedies Juice and Such Brave Girls, Things You Should Have Done showcases a bright new writing and performing talent. The premise is terrific and gives the show immediate potential to return — Lucia will inherit her family home, but only if she completes a list compiled by her mum. Shades of My Name is Earl, in which a ne’er-do-well attempts to right his past wrongs, though the idea of a list is all they share. For most people, Lucia’s tasks would be well within their grasp, such as learning to tell the time or making a friend, but for her they’re Herculean. She lives in a near-dream state of distraction, oblivious to social norms, and her benign self-absorption drags everyone she meets into a chaos vortex, like a stoned version of Trainspotting’s Begbie. The way she meets her driving instructor in the first episode is painfully funny, as is how she upends his home life. You might root for Lucia’s self-improvement, but her perma-furious aunt Karen (Selin Hizli) cannot abide her fecklessness, nor that she’s been left the house. Karen’s anger with Lucia, as well as her own family, is the spiky foil to Lucia’s haziness. A thing you should do is give this a go.
Monty Don’s Spanish Gardens
BBC2, 8pm
There’s a hint of worldly spy to Monty Don, which is why he is doubly suited to investigating the extravagant gardens of La Fortaleza in Mallorca, home to Hugh Laurie’s arms dealer Richard Roper in The Night Manager. Mission completed, Don travels to the mainland to continue his journey towards Seville, via Estepona, a town which decided to prioritise the quality of life for its residents over motor vehicles. Where once snarled up tarmac existed, people wander freely in a wide communal garden, and the streets have been populated with 16,000 pots of bright flowers. It’ll never catch on.
Darren McGarvey: The State We’re In
BBC2, 9pm
Over three episodes the rapper, author, and campaigner Darren McGarvey sets out to uncover the true state of the UK’s justice, health, and education systems. That’s three episodes to fit in material which could make for the country’s longest-running TV show. In this first instalment, which aired earlier this week on BBC Scotland, McGarvey explores the many stages of the justice system, a journey that includes meeting Leeann White, whose daughter Ava was murdered, and asking the barrister Joanna Hardy-Susskind why the profession went on strike. There’s an unexpected moment at a prison for McGarvey, too, when he meets someone he knows.
The Mighty Mississippi with Nick Knowles
Channel 5, 9pm
If, after nearly two months, your new year’s resolution to spend more time watching Nick Knowles water-ski seemed to be heading for failure, we have some good news for you. The Mississippi is the cradle of water-skiing, after 18-year-old Ralph Samuelson strapped some wood to his feet and was towed behind his brother’s boat in 1922 — so Knowles is obliged to give it a shot during a trip to the state in this two-part series. Mark Twain, slavery and endangered fish all feature too, as does the answer to a future pub quiz question: what do Barack Obama, Jon Hamm and Knowles all have in common?
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Rob Beckett’s Smart TV
Sky Max/Now, 9pm
From the title, you may assume that this is the comedian boasting about his clever telly — but it’s actually a new comedy panel show about telly, hosted by Beckett. The day that Goggleboxers watch an episode where Gogglebox is featured, known reality will twist itself into an infinite loop. Until that fateful moment, the team captains, Alison Hammond and Josh Widdicombe, will be accompanied by guests who are out to prove their viewing knowledge. The rounds include one in which teams have to identify disguised Big Brother contestants. Beckett is no stern ringmaster and even calls the players “nerds”, prompting Widdicombe to fire back with, “Sorry for knowing about TV on a TV quiz.”
Catch-up TV, by James Jackson
The Grand Tour: Sand Job
Prime Video
The Grand Tour is vrooming towards its terminus — reportedly just two more specials and it’ll be done. This instalment is a real scorcher as it has Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May reuniting in Mauritania, a remote west African country. It is four times the size of the UK and two thirds of it is Sahara desert wilderness (or, as Clarkson declaims, “The biggest desert … in the world”). Into this “gigantic sea of superheated emptiness” arrive our trio to follow in the footsteps of the Paris-Dakar rally. However, the vehicles are not high-tech racers, but cheap modified sports cars not immune to breakdowns. The usual petrol-fuelled mishaps ensue through this Mad Max-ish landscape, and great fun it is too.
Film choice, by Kevin Maher
The Red Shoes (PG, 1948)
BBC4, 8pm
One of the most influential films in history, this Powell and Pressburger fantasy is film-nerd heaven. From the opening candle-and-book shot, referenced in The Royal Tenenbaums, to the closing staircase dash, copied by Scorsese in Shutter Island, there is little here that hasn’t been pored over, nodded to or stolen in the 76 years since its release. It tells the story of the wannabe prima ballerina Vicky Page (Moira Shearer), who realises her dreams yet pays a horrible price. The central idea, that success in art must be accompanied by personal failure, has obvious allure for Tinseltown’s brightest workaholics, and it was validated by Powell’s deeply complicated private life. So, The Red Shoes is artistically perfect, but it asks us to acknowledge the human cost. (135min)
Doctor Zhivago (PG, 1965)
BBC4, 10.10pm
Epic seems too small a description for the ambition and romance of David Lean’s version of Boris Pasternak’s novel. It begins before the Russian revolution in Moscow, where the young Lara (Julie Christie) is being courted by the Bolshevik rebel Pasha (Tom Courtenay) but falls into the lascivious hands of Komarovsky (Rod Steiger). Meanwhile, the idealistic doctor and poet Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) marries his childhood friend, but not before he catches a glimpse of Lara’s wild passion. History seizes them all in an icy, bloody vice while the story goes out into the snowbound steppes and war zones as the First World War passes and the Tsar’s regime falls. Sharif and Christie’s illicit passion intensifies with Maurice Jarre’s Lara’s Theme. (188min) Kate Muir
Radio choice, by Ben Dowell
In Our Time
Radio 4, 9am
Today’s subject is the uncertainty principle, formulated by the German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg in 1927, which says that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle with perfect accuracy. Its influential suggestion of a fundamental limit to what we can know about the way the universe operates was also something Einstein grappled with. Helping Melvyn Bragg make sense of it all are the leading physicists Frank Close (Oxford University) Harry Cliff (Cambridge) and Fay Dowker (Imperial College London).
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Looking for something else to watch? Try our critics’ round-up of the latest best shows to stream in the UK.
Or consult our platform-specific guides to the best Netflix TV shows, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows, the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer plus the best shows to watch on Sky and Now.
Or how about discovering our critics’ favourite hidden gem TV shows to stream?