For full TV listings for the week, see thetimes.co.uk/tvplanner
Viewing guide, by Joe Clay
Dolly: The Sheep that Changed the World
BBC2, 9pm
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Dolly’s birth turned scientific thinking on its head and the achievement was controversial because some saw implications for cloning humans. However, its biggest impact has been in advances into research on stem cells. This enjoyable documentary, first shown on BBC Scotland last month, examines Dolly’s story 25 years on, told in depth by the scientists at the Roslin Institute in Midlothian who created it. John Bracken, the senior large animal technician at Roslin, reveals how special the animal was, even before she was born. “We would sleep in the surgical unit during the night to make sure that if [the ewe carrying Dolly] started going into labour there was someone here,” he says. After the successful birth, the team received calls from Downing Street, the White House and even the Vatican and were “overwhelmed by requests” from the public, including pleas to bring back loved ones. The team even got a shout-out from their creation’s namesake, Dolly Parton (Dolly the sheep was so-called because of a quip about mammary cells). The film also reveals the story of the animal activists who broke into Roslin to try to liberate Dolly, only to encounter a problem — they couldn’t tell which one she was. Dolly died aged six in 2003 from lung disease. Professor Bruce Whitelaw, group leader in animal biotechnology at Roslin at the time, says: “It was like losing part of the team.” Dolly was stuffed and can now be found in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Welcome to Earth
Disney+
Will Smith is everywhere at the moment (promoting his autobiography, playing Venus and Serena Williams’s dad in the movie King Richard) and in case you haven’t had your fix, he’s also fronting this new natural history series from National Geographic. Like a Hollywood version of Steve Backshall, Smith is throwing himself into the unknown and travelling to some of the most extreme places on the planet, including the deep ocean, caves and volcanoes. “I asked the best modern-day explorers: take me to the ends of the Earth,” Smith says in the trailer. “And they said, ‘Oh, we can go further than that.’ ”
Walking with Monica Galetti
BBC2, 7pm
The chef and MasterChef: The Professionals judge Monica Galetti is taking a stroll on the North York Moors National Park on a chilly, sunny morning. She starts high on Chimney Bank, drops down into the village of Rosedale Abbey and then crosses from Rosedale into Farndale, ending up in the quiet hamlet of Church Houses, where she enjoys a pint of local ale. It’s not an area she knows well, so her commentary is restricted to exclamations about the outstanding views and how her perambulation is “great for the soul”. But it is a restful and visually sumptuous half-hour of slow TV.
Grand Designs: House of the Year 2021
Channel 4, 9pm
Kevin McCloud, the design expert Michelle Ogundehin and the architect Damion Burrows complete their tour of the homes on the long list for the Royal Institute of British Architects House of the Year. The final five houses all reinvent beloved types of buildings, including a modern reboot of a classic Kentish oast house, an eco-home in Devon that reimagines the country house, and a contemporary take on a suburban family home in Surrey. One will make it on to the shortlist, with McCloud then announcing the overall winner before the credits roll.
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Positive
Sky Documentaries/Now, 10pm
The frank documentary telling the story of Britain’s 40-year battle with HIV concludes with a double bill. The second episode starts in 1986, when Aids was still seen as a disease of “sexually active gay men, of injecting drugs . . . and people from Africa”, says Tony Whitehead of the Terrence Higgins Trust. At the height of the crisis a hard-hitting public health campaign instigated by the health secretary Norman Fowler, a rare empathic presence in Thatcher’s government, doubtless saved countless lives. The final episode starts ten years later and tells a more positive story of landmark research, enlightened attitudes and the invention of anti-HIV drugs.
Catch-up TV
Queen of Speed
Sky/Now
The story of Michèle Mouton’s rise to the top of the male-dominated world of rally driving in the 1970s and 1980s is a rich one. Without narration (as seems to be the vogue with sports films), it is packed with adrenaline-filled highs and lows as she made history by winning four World Rally Championships. But it’s also a portrait of an extraordinarily determined and talented woman’s battle with sexism. Rallying, when she started, was seen as an exclusively male preserve and nobody, we’re told, “wanted to lose to the girl”. But win she did — in her first year with the Audi Quattro, she took a surprise victory at the Rallye Sanremo. It was to be the first of many and would lead to Stirling Moss saying Mouton was “one of the best”. Ben Dowell
Film choice, by Kate Muir
Free State of Jones (15, 2016)
BBC2, 11.15pm
Matthew McConaughey stars as Newton Knight, a battle-weary Confederate soldier who deserts, deciding that he no longer wants to fight for the rights of slave owners. As corrupt, sleazy Confederates take local farmers’ supplies, Knight fights a guerrilla war and hides in a swampland forest with a group of runaway slaves. The small revolution in Jones County, Mississippi, is seen partly through the prism of a white rebel rescuing African-Americans, but there is also a decent and complex part for Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Rachel, who becomes Knight’s common-law wife. Directed by Gary Ross, the film tries too hard to chart years of racial history in the South, but uncovers some fresh territory nevertheless. (133min)
Another Year (12, 2010)
Channel 4, 1am
This treasure of a film is Mike Leigh at his best. It unspools in four chapters, coinciding with the seasons of the year in question. It’s as British thematically as mugs of strong tea sipped in the well-kept allotment that provides a visual motif throughout, but structurally it has more in common with European cinema. It is an organic portrait of reality with no dramatic climaxes, just an ebb and flow of daily life. This is a disarmingly humane work that celebrates something rarely seen in contemporary cinema: the stable, happy family. Leigh regulars Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen play married couple Tom and Gerri so easily that the joke of their names has long since stopped being a talking point. Orbiting their stable core are less sorted satellite characters. (129min) Wendy Ide
Radio choice, by Joe Clay
The Folk Show with Mark Radcliffe
Radio 2, 9pm
Spell Songs is an ensemble of eight folk-inspired writer-musicians, including Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita and Kris Drever, who formed to create a musical evolution of the book The Lost Words by the writer Robert Macfarlane and the painter Jackie Morris. The book was inspired by the increasingly forgotten English words for nature and tonight Mark Radcliffe is joined by Drever and Morris to discuss Spell Songs II: Let The Light In, the second nature-inspired album from the collective, which weaves into the music “spoken voice, whispers, accents, dialects, native languages, birdsong, the bark of foxes and the soft sound of a moth’s wing”.