For full TV listings for the week, see thetimes.co.uk/tvplanner
Viewing guide, by Ben Dowell
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Romantic Road Trip
Sky Arts/Now, 8pm
Frank Skinner and his crime writer pal Denise Mina continue their journey to the places that meant most to the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And if you saw the first episode (or their previous series about Boswell and Dr Johnson) you will know what passionate and likeable guides they are. Tonight’s second episode continues in the West Country with the poets feeling isolated in Somerset as locals suspect them of being spies. William and his sister Dorothy soon moved to their childhood home in the north and if it weren’t for their hostile, nosey neighbours, the Lake poets might have been known as the Somerset poets, Mina notes. Coleridge visited Wordsworth frequently, but it’s around this point their friendship started to fracture. Mina is very much our Coleridge person, drawn to the spooky, gothic strangeness of his writing and taking us to the farmhouse where Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan before being famously interrupted by the man from Porlock. Skinner is on Wordsworth detail, travelling to Tintern Abbey to read the poet’s beautiful reflection on the lasting and healing power of nature. Later he is moved to tears by a visit to a broken sheepfold, possibly the one Wordsworth had in mind when writing Michael, his lovely poem about father and son, love and loss. “Wordsworth died 200 years ago but I can feel the feelings in this poem right here,” says Skinner who, like Michael in the poem, had a child of his own late in life. “Don’t let anyone tell you that poetry is some flimsy thing.”
Amazing Hotels
BBC2, 8pm
Monica Galetti and Giles Coren head to Croatia’s modern, glass-fronted Grand Park Hotel overlooking the Istrian coastline for the third instalment of the latest series of their amiable travel show. They learn from the hotel staff how the venue was built under communist rule to provide a luxury destination for tourists that would plough money back into the region. Coren explores an art gallery hidden deep inside the hotel structure and prunes some of the plants that frame the view of the old town. Galetti, who often gets the tougher gigs, learns how to clean Europe’s biggest single glass window before they head off together to go truffle hunting with dogs.
The Yorkshire Vet at Christmas
Channel 5, 8pm
Narrated by Christopher Timothy, the actor who played James Herriot in the BBC’s version of All Creatures Great and Small, this real-life account of the lives of country vets in three Yorkshire practices should warm the cockles. Tonight’s stories follow a vet battling across the snowy moors to help a stricken sheep as well as efforts to reunite a lost parrot with its owner. Other stories follow a pet turkey called Mrs Gobble — yes, indeed — who has been attacked by a dog, and an operation to remove a large tumour on a much-loved 12-year-old terrier called Matt. After all that, there’s just enough time for the Huddersfield team to build a snow vet and head to the pub.
Christmas Magic at Kew Gardens
Channel 5, 9pm
You might think that winter is a quiet period for staff at the Royal Botanic Gardens, but as this jolly one-off episode demonstrates that is not the case. The trees have shed their foliage but the festive period plays host to intense activity in the shop, the kitchen, the glass houses and even the compost heap. We find the team hanging lights on Britain’s tallest living Christmas tree, and cutting kale and Jerusalem artichokes in the vegetable garden, with scientists offering seasonal insights into the horticultural importance of frankincense.
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Landscapers
Sky Atlantic/Now, 9pm
This weird fictionalisation of the real-life tale of Susan Edwards, her husband Christopher and the discovery of her parents’ bodies, improves this episode. The couple, played by Olivia Colman and David Thewlis, have surrendered to the British police and a sense of what might have actually happened begins to emerge. It continues to be overlaid by a heavily self-conscious conceit involving Susan’s Walter Mitty-style fantasies about her life and marriage, while the puzzled, slightly crude behaviour of the police investigators serve almost as a comic foil to the pair. Can this mousey, polite woman and her loyal husband really be ruthless killers?
Catch-up TV, by Ben Dowell
Who Do You Think You Are?
BBC iPlayer
The comedian Josh Widdicombe begins searching his family history at an unassuming Dartmoor primary school. However, his anxiety that his investigations might show that he comes “from a really boring family” are not borne out. Vague recollections of family talk that the clan Widdicombe was related to the Barings banking dynasty prove correct, but that is merely the hors d’oeuvre. After startling findings involving Elizabeth I and Mary Boleyn, Widdicombe unfurls a scroll of his family tree with the name of a medieval king on it. Also available on iPlayer are the other episodes in this series, featuring the TV presenter Alex Scott, the comedian Joe Lycett, the TV personality Joe Sugg, the former politician Ed Balls, the singer Pixie Lott and Judi Dench.
Film choice, by Joe Clay
Holiday Affair (U, 1949)
BBC2, 2.15pm
Hollywood’s go-to tough guy Robert Mitchum makes an unlikely leading man in this vintage festive rom-com, based on the story Christmas Gift by John D Weaver. Mitchum plays Steve Mason, a war veteran working as a department-store salesman in New York, who loses his job after a run-in with Christmas shopper Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh). However, a burgeoning romance with war widow Connie more than makes up for his unemployment, although he must first see off her longtime steady suitor, dull lawyer Carl Davis (Wendell Corey), and form a bond with “the man of house” — Connie’s son, Timmy (Gordon Gebert). Mitchum was cast in this softer role in a bid to help him to rehabilitate his image after he was arrested for possession of marijuana. (87min)
Spider-Man: Homecoming (12, 2017)
BBC1, 10.35pm
How do you make a Spider-Man movie after five slightly repetitious and only fitfully entertaining Spider-Man movies? The answer, as evinced by the deviously original Spider-Man: Homecoming, is even more simple. You don’t make a Spider-Man movie. You make a high-school drama, with jocks, nerds, high-school dances and nods to 1980s John Hughes movies (the director Jon Watts got the cast to binge-watch Hughes films before shooting started), and you weave through it just enough Spider-Man (Tom Holland) action to justify the title and to reinvigorate an exhausted brand. Michael Keaton is the villain, the Vulture, a brilliant invention who steals and sells weapons because he wants to pay his mortgage. (133min) Kevin Maher
Radio choice, by Ben Dowell
The Comedy Club: Concrete Cow
Radio 4 Extra, 11.30pm
First broadcast in 2002, this sketch show features the early work of some pretty formidable talent including Sally Hawkins as well as future Oscar-winner Olivia Colman and her Peep Show collaborator Robert Webb. The sketches include two tearaway Peckham children entering and vandalising Narnia. “See that lamppost, do you think I could bend it,” says one of them, before revealing to Mr Tumnus the faun that she probably won’t understand CS Lewis’s Christian references because they have only done “Hinduism , Islam . . . and the ones with the slaphead orange people” in class. Among the writers are Hawkins herself, Jon Holmes, Robin Ince and Tim Key.