Viewing guide, by Chris Bennion
World Athletics Championships 2017
BBC Two, 6pm/BBC One, 7pm
The 2012 Olympic Games was an extraordinary event for Britain, one that transformed — for three short weeks — this sometimes reserved nation into a country of grinning optimists. We promised to bottle that energy once the medals had been swept up and the javelins packed away. We didn’t. Given the events of the past 12 months, how we need a little of that Olympic togetherness now. Here’s our chance. Gabby Logan presents from the London Stadium as the World Athletics Championships are staged in Britain for the first time. Ten days of athletics begin tonight, and while we have Mo Farah, Caster Semenya and Laura Muir to look forward to, these championships will be dominated by one man: Usain Bolt. The eight-time Olympic champion has announced he is to retire, but before he does, the Jamaican megastar will try to turn his 11 World Championship golds into 13. He will run in the 100m heats this evening before — and I’ll chance my arm with this one — competing in his last 100m final tomorrow night. His final act as an athlete will be next Saturday, in the 4x100m relay. The highlight tonight is Farah, who is competing for gold in the 10,000m (9.20pm). Next Saturday Farah will line up in the 5,000m as he tries to win the 5,000m/10,000m double for a fifth time (twice at the World Championships, twice at the Olympics, so far). Go, Mo. To mark your card for the weekend: the men’s long jump final is tomorrow (8.05pm), Katarina Johnson-Thompson completes the heptathlon on Sunday (8.40pm), while another Jamaican superstar, Elaine Thompson, goes for gold in the 100m, also on Sunday (9.50pm).
The Secret Life of the Holiday Resort
Channel 4, 8pm
The temptation when watching this new series, filmed in the largest all-inclusive holiday resort on the Costa Del Sol, is to shout: “Not all British holidaymakers!” Most of the visitors to Holiday World are British, and the picture painted here is of lager, sunburn, all-you-can-eat fry-ups and copies of the Daily Star. It makes you realise just how accurate the ITV comedy Benidorm is. However, the Brits aboard here are a pleasant bunch, and there are some intriguing insights — it turns out that we like pillows, but not towels, although we are still world leaders in getting them on the sunloungers.
BBC Proms 2017: Ella and Dizzy Revisited
BBC Four, 8pm
The Proms’ new-found obsession with anniversaries continues and tonight marks the centenary of the birth of two titans of jazz, Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie. The Grammy award-winning singer Dianne Reeves and the Australian trumpet virtuoso James Morrison will join the BBC Concert Orchestra to work their way through the Great American Songbook, which underpinned Fitzgerald’s career, and a selection of Gillespie’s Afro-Latin and bebop numbers. The man with the baton in his hand is John Mauceri, the Grammy, Tony and Olivier award-winning conductor, famed for his work on Broadway and in Hollywood.
Down the Tracks: The Music That Influenced Bob Dylan
Sky Arts, 9pm
Fans of His Bobness will have heard plenty about his musical influences from his excellent Theme Time Radio Hour (which went out on 6 Music between 2007 and 2009). This two-hour documentary explores Dylan’s evolving interest in music, from stating in his school yearbook that his ambition was “to join Little Richard” to his love of the early blues of Blind Willie McTell, and country singers such as Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. It also looks at his interest in Harry Smith and his Anthology of American Folk Music compilation and the influence of the Carter Family and Dylan’s early mentor Pete Seeger. Joe Clay
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Autopsy: Kurt Cobain
Channel 5, 10.05pm
While it is never the most salubrious of series, Autopsy can often, ironically, shed light on the lives of its famous subjects. The suicide of the Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994 is one of the rock’n’roll deaths that has an enduring fascination, not least because Cobain was at the height of his fame when he died. Dr Jason Payne-James, a British expert in legal and forensic medicine, asks why a man who had recently got married, had a baby and become a millionaire would take his life. Some, including Cobain’s father-in-law, believe that he was murdered. Most, of course, don’t.
Catch-up TV, by Joe Clay
Ackley Bridge
channel4.com
While other soaps tackle the intricacies of life in multicultural Britain in the odd plotline, Ackley Bridge, a six-part drama set in a school in a fictional West Yorkshire mill town, brought it front and centre. Two segregated comprehensive schools have been forced to merge into one academy because of budget cuts, and lives and cultures collide, with all the conflict and high drama that entails. It isn’t afraid of tackling difficult issues, albeit via the glossy, heightened soap-opera format. The younger actors are excellent, especially Poppy Lee Friar and Amy-Leigh Hickman as “bezzies” Missy and Nas. The former is involved in the most convincing storyline as her home situation becomes increasingly desperate.
Film choice, by Wendy Ide
The Infiltrator (15, 2016)
Sky Cinema Premiere, 8pm
This tells the true tale of a US Customs agent who in the mid-1980s went undercover in Miami, posing as a crooked business investor to gain access to the highest echelons of the criminal banking world and the drug cartel of Pablo Escobar. Within the first ten minutes you know what you’re getting. And it’s bucketfuls of stomach-tightening angst on behalf of the protagonist, Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston). Mazur cooks up a plan to penetrate the heart of the Escobar cartel and the pleasure is in watching Mazur bed down among the mobsters, killers and dealers, and seeing how they change him, play on his weaknesses and muddy his soul. Like Mazur, you’ll be put through the wringer. In a good way. (127min) Kevin Maher
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The Help (12, 2011)
BBC Two, 11.05pm
This awards-friendly race parable is set in 1960s Mississippi. Skeeter (the very likeable Emma Stone) is the unconventional daughter of a Southern matriarch (Allison Janney), who measures her daughter’s worth in her ability to attract a husband of good prospects. The impeccably plucked eyebrows of the girls in her social circle are raised indulgently at Skeeter’s aspirations to be a writer. When Skeeter stumbles on the idea of interviewing the maids to tell their stories to the world, two women prove invaluable. Aibileen (Viola Davis) is quietly, sadly articulate about raising the children of people who don’t consider you fit to share the same bathroom. Minny (Octavia Spencer) is sassy and seething with anger. (146min)
Safety Not Guaranteed (15, 2012)
Film4, 2.20am
Fans of quirky low-budget sci-fi will warm to this decidedly offbeat time-travel movie. A trio of journalists decide to investigate an advert in the personal column of a newspaper seeking a partner in a time-travel venture. Of the three, it is glum hipster Darius (Aubrey Plaza, irresistibly dour) who forges a connection with the potential time traveller Kenneth (Mark Duplass). Plaza is hugely enjoyable in this — it’s a joy to see her eye-rolling ironic detachment melt as she finds herself genuinely excited by Kenneth’s mad ambitions. Wry, funny and likeable, this is a neat idea, well executed. The ending would have been improved by a little more ambiguity, but otherwise this is a lot of fun. (86min)
Radio choice, by Joe Clay
Friday Night is Music Night
Radio 2, 8pm
The King’s Lynn Festival is the setting for Friday Night is Music Night (recorded on July 26) as Ken Bruce presents a concert of musical heroes and villains from the worlds of television, film and theatre. The goodies are represented by such characters as Robin Hood — hopefully Michael Kamen’s theme from Prince of Thieves rather than an orchestral version of Bryan Adams’s (Everything I Do) I Do It For You — and Ross Poldark (Anne “Art of Noise” Dudley’s stirring Poldark theme tune). Meanwhile, the baddies can count in their number Darth Vader (John Williams’s Imperial March, which some Star Wars fanatics have been known to walk down the aisle to) and Marlon Brando’s The Godfather, from the score composed by Nino Rota. Richard Balcombe conducts the BBC Concert Orchestra with guest artists the soprano Jeni Bern, the baritone Adrian Der Gregorian and the Slovakian sibling violin virtuosi Vladimir & Anton.
CrowdScience
World Service, 8.30pm
Do animals commit premeditated murder for reasons other than survival? That is the question posed by a World Service listener from New York, and it sends the CrowdScience team off on a journey through the deep forests of Budongo in Uganda. They are seeking our closest primate relative — the chimpanzee — which is known to kill not only members from rival tribes, but also its kin. What does this morbid behaviour say about the evolution of lethal aggression, and are murderous thoughts innate to humans as well as chimpanzees?