For full TV listings for the week, see thetimes.co.uk/tvplanner
Viewing guide, by Ben Dowell
The Killing of PC Harper: A Widow’s Fight for Justice
ITV, 9pm
On August 15, 2019, on the way back from a shift with a colleague, PC Andrew Harper attempted to apprehend a vehicle whose occupants had stolen a quad bike from a property in Berkshire. As he was seeking to make an arrest, the criminals fled. The looped tow rope they had fashioned for the theft caught Harper by the foot and dragged him for a mile at speed down a narrow country lane. When Harper’s police colleagues discovered his body they initially assumed that they had come upon a bloodied deer carcass in the road. The apparent lack of remorse from those charged with the death is another sickening detail of this story, with pictures of them pulling faces and laughing almost making one despair for humanity. This is an exhaustive and unflinching account of the crime, with police body-cam footage showing harrowing scenes of the incident as well as the moment when the suspects were arrested at a traveller site in the early hours of the following morning. Three men received manslaughter convictions because the jury were not convinced beyond reasonable doubt that the defendants knew they were dragging Harper. As well as visiting the scene of the crime and talking to Harper’s colleagues, the presenter Trevor McDonald meets the police officer’s widow, Lissie, who married him only four weeks before his death. This hugely impressive woman is campaigning for Harper’s Law, which would secure an automatic life sentence for anyone guilty of killing an emergency worker while committing a crime.
Love Your Garden
ITV, 8pm
Alan Titchmarsh, the gentle-voiced Yorkshireman, is taking on his biggest garden project yet: challenging himself to grow more food than he’s done before. This special episode has the cameras following him from spring until harvest as he transforms his bare back yard into a kitchen garden filled with more than 60 varieties of produce from potatoes and carrots to more unusual crops such as watermelon radishes and pear-shaped tomatoes. Also meeting a similar challenge is the presenter Kate Garraway, who wants to create a scented experience for her unwell husband, Derek.
Rock Till We Drop
BBC2, 9pm
It’s episode three of the rock reality show and the wrinkly hopefuls’ mentors, Martin Kemp and Lady Leshurr, know that their bands need to start improving if they are to stand any chance of performing live at the Isle of Wight Festival. Martin’s outfit gets an immediate lift as their new drummer, 79-year-old Barry, impresses as Roy’s replacement, while the 80-year-old ex-head teacher Eileen’s backing vocals on a track about gangsters isn’t bad either. However, there are problems with Lady Leshurr’s line-up as the 77-year-old lead singer Bette is refusing to sing her song choice — Coldplay’s Viva La Vida — because she says she doesn’t understand the lyrics. Does anyone?
New Lives in the Wild
Channel 5, 9pm
When Ben Fogle visited the incomparable Lynx Vilden in the wilds of Washington state in 2016 she had already spent 25 years living the prehistoric life, eating bear fat, hunting with bow and arrows, and sleeping under buffalo skin. In tonight’s episode he pays her another house call and discovers why she has moved continents to set up home in the Norwegian forest. With winter arriving and temperatures below zero, Vilden isn’t making life any easier for herself: one of her first challenges is getting through the winter without using any metal technology.
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The Witchfinder
BBC2, 10pm
This strange comedy about 17th-century witch-hunting continues to be in questionable taste, but seems finally to have found its purpose. The opener shown last week was clearly designed to set this up as an odd-couple road movie (on horseback) involving Tim Key’s mildly idiotic witchfinder Bannister and Thomasine, the woman he has accused of witchcraft, played by Daisy May Cooper with a gobby air similar to the one she displays in her comedy This Country. However, as civil war rages, a tense encounter with some drunken Cavalier soldiers might just stop their journey in its tracks.
Catch-up TV, by Joe Clay
Fantastic Beasts: A Natural History
BBC iPlayer
Stephen Fry is your guide to the magical creatures that continue to captivate us even in the age of science and technology. With the help of scientists, historians, writers and film-makers, Fry finds out why the world of magical animals is so popular. He bases himself at the Natural History Museum in London, a place where the worlds of science and fiction collide, to reveal the real-life beasts that have inspired some of the greatest legends in history. JK Rowling is among those contributing in an escapist hour that takes in dragons, unicorns and mermaids, travelling from Utah to Loch Ness, and includes exclusive visual effects from the team behind Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts movie franchise.
Film choice, by Wendy Ide
Scarlet Street (PG, 1945)
Great! Movies Classic, 2.35pm
Inspired by Jean Renoir’s La Chienne, the Austrian director Fritz Lang produced perhaps one of the bleakest and darkest of all the films noir. Joan Bennett plays Kitty, a femme fatale who starts an affair with a miserable clerk, Christopher Cross (Edward G Robinson). Kitty and her conman fiancé, Johnny (Dan Duryea), believe that Cross is a successful artist so they set about taking him for every penny. When the briefly happy Cross paints Kitty’s portrait, she claims it as her own work, stealing his only chance at recognition. Being a film noir, it naturally all ends in murder, madness and ruin. The black and white photography from Milton Krasner is as unforgiving as the storytelling. (98min)
Colette (15, 2018)
BBC2, 11.15pm
Keira Knightley stars in the story of the pioneering French novelist Colette’s liberating journey away from a controlling man, the “literary entrepreneur” Henry Gauthier-Villars (Dominic West), who colonises her talents. It’s similar in theme to Mary Shelley, The Wife and Big Eyes, but it’s tonally uneven, with snickering slices of Carry On (jaunty sex montages) and sudden jolts of Virginia Woolf. “Did you ever feel that you were playing a part? Of the wife and the mother?” Colette, in serious mode, asks of concerned parent Fiona Shaw. The performances are uniformly just fine, with West playing the thigh-slapping buffoon just long enough to make the monster inside truly repellent. Knightley’s Colette is fine too, but nothing more. (112min) Kevin Maher
Radio choice, by Ben Dowell
The Documentary
World Service, 8.06pm
Bougainville, perched on the very eastern edge of Papua New Guinea, is about to become the world’s newest country. It’s a lush tropical region, rich in natural resources and minerals, but with a long history of occupation and strife, including a ten-year civil war between local rebels and government forces that killed thousands. In 2019 hope arrived when more than 98 per cent of Bougainville’s population voted to separate from Papua New Guinea. The local reporter Louiseanne Laris examines whether the country can successfully govern itself after many tough years, and meets people still scarred by the conflict, struggling to rebuild their lives and the country around them.