Viewing guide, by Chris Bennion
Surgeons: At the Edge of Life
BBC Two, 9pm
Surgery in British hospitals has hit the headlines this month, with Theresa May having to apologise to patients for thousands of cancelled operations. Alongside these dispiriting stories, many of you will have been watching this remarkable series on the pioneering surgeons of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham. One thing is clear — any problems within our operating theatres are not down to a lack of skill, care, courage, heart or ingenuity from the scalpel-wielders. One way, as we see in tonight’s final episode, to skip the queues and ensure that your operation is performed in double-quick time is to sign up for clinical trials. We rarely react with horror these days to experimental surgery (although head transplants will take some getting used to), however it still carries a huge risk for the surgeon and patient. “You are sticking your head above the parapet,” says the surgeon Richard Irving, as he guides a drill into a patient’s skull to make a 0.6mm hole, in which he will put a tiny, internal hearing aid. A year’s planning, a lot of money, his reputation and the patient’s health are at stake. “You have to be very careful,” he says, drily. Also shown: the surgeon Richard Laing pioneering a method of rehabilitating donor livers; the plastic surgeon Steven Jeffery using a way of checking for harmful bacteria on burn victims’ skin that gives an instant diagnosis; and the urological surgeon Prashant Patel injecting a prostate cancer patient with a genetically modified virus. One of few professions where you can confidently say that they deserve every penny.
Further recommendations
An 83-year-old woman with suspected sepsis is rushed to St George’s hospital in 24 Hours in A&E (Tues, Channel 4, 9pm)
Great American Railroad Journeys
BBC Two, 6.30pm
“I’ve crossed the Atlantic!” booms Michael Portillo at the beginning of another railroad odyssey in North America. This time he is travelling from Boston to Toronto, charting the story of US independence as he goes. He begins in the “cradle of the American revolution”, Boston, where he samples oysters, explores the streetcar system and — treason! – dumps bags of East India Company tea in the harbour. He also visits Lowell, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in America. But I know what you really want to know. The answer: pastel yellow jacket, royal blue chinos.
Silent Witness
BBC One, 9pm
The “special relationship” is put to the test tonight when an American embassy diplomat is shot dead in London. Nikki (Emilia Fox) and her forensic pathology chums can barely get near the corpse as it is squabbled over by the Metropolitan Police, British counterterrorism, the FBI and the embassy. Working together might be the best bet, however, as our killer has a few more victims on his checklist. Nikki, meanwhile, develops a special relationship of her own with the embassy’s chief of mission (Michael Landes). In other news: how awful is that new theme music? Excruciating.
Next of Kin
ITV, 9pm
The dynamic of the Shirani/Harcourt family is so nicely done in Next of Kin that I rather wish — for purely selfish reasons — they hadn’t got involved in a convoluted terrorism plot. The bickering siblings, the chain-smoking gran, the family dance-alongs; it’s all rather lovely. But, hey ho, this is a fast-paced (200mph) thriller so we are compelled to hectically jiggle through backstreets to a constant thumping soundtrack. Last time we saw Mona (Archie Panjabi) she had just been shot, courtesy of a cack-handed Lahore policeman. She wants answers, but so too do the police. Where, they ask, is her nephew, Danish?
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Active Shooter: America Under Fire
Sky Atlantic, 9pm
HBO’s series on recent mass shootings in America is terrific, high-class documentary making. But, boy, do you need a strong constitution to sit down and watch it. Tonight’s episode provides a detailed account of the San Bernardino shooting of December 2, 2015, when Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married couple who had been radicalised online, opened fire on a work Christmas party at the Inland Regional Center. As ever, the survivors and members of the emergency services speak with courage and restraint, but it is hard not to feel blind anger at such a cowardly act.
Catch-up TV, by Joe Clay
Fighting for Air
BBC iPlayer, to February 9
Air pollution cuts short the lives of about 50,000 Brits every year, but is it possible to improve the quality of the air we breathe in just one day? The man with a plan is Dr Xand van Tulleken, who is enlisting the help of the good folk of Kings Heath in Birmingham to stage the first large-scale experiment of its kind: using people power to try to bring about a real improvement in air quality. With pollution levels on the high street at the cusp of legal limits, the odds are stacked against the doctor and his team, which includes some of the best experts in pollution science. Can they succeed where governments have failed?
Film choice, by Chris Bennion
Sahara (PG, 1943)
Film4, 3.10pm
Humphrey Bogart chews the scenery, as well as the Saharan sand, in Zoltan Korda’s entertaining Second World War drama. Bogie, as US army Master Sergeant Joe Gunn, has to lead a ragtag band of Allied soldiers, plus two prisoners of war, one Italian, one German, across the Libyan desert to find water and avoid a posse of pursuing Nazi troops. Bookmarked by real events of the previous year — Gunn and his men are retreating from the Battle of Gazala at the start and the film closes with news of Allied victory at El Alamein — the film has no interest in being even-handed, but Gunn’s battle of wills with the German commander Major von Falken (John Wengraf) is expertly handled. (97min)
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Sorry, Wrong Number (12, 1948)
Film4, 5.10pm
Lucille Fletcher (who wrote the story The Hitch-Hiker, which would become one of The Twilight Zone’s most famous episodes) adapted her own enduringly popular radio play for this clever film noir directed by Anatole Litvak (Anastasia). Set in real time over one evening, the simple premise has Barbara Stanwyck’s spoilt, bedridden daddy’s girl Leona Stevenson accidentally eavesdrop on a phone call between two men. All she hears is that they are planning to kill a woman at 11.15pm. But who? And how is her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster) involved? As the clock ticks towards the fated hour, Leona gets on the blower to find some answers. (89min)
Love & Other Drugs (15, 2010)
Film4, 1am
Jake Gyllenhaal’s salesman Jamie Randall is a smirking sleazeball who pimps out his perfect smile to sway the credulous into buying stuff they don’t need. Jamie is one half of the romantic pairing at the heart of the film, and while he is without doubt the more irritating of the two, I can’t say I was exactly grief-stricken by the revelation that the feisty-but-vulnerable Maggie (Anne Hathaway) had a degenerative disease. This being a Hollywood movie, her condition is largely asymptomatic until a convenient plot point about 70 minutes into the story. Where the film deviates from other terminal disease romances is the sex. There’s an awful lot of it. You have to admire the actors’ stamina, if nothing else. (112min) Wendy Ide
Radio choice, by Catherine Nixey
Reading Europe — Turkey: The Red-Haired Woman
Radio 4, 10.45pm
Radio 4 continues its struggle to encourage the British public to do that most un-British of things: read literature first written in another language. This week the language in question is Turkish. Which inevitably means Elif Shafak (yesterday) and the Nobel prizewinner Orhan Pamuk (today), Turkey’s two novelists. Or at any rate the two we hear of on Radio 4. Today begins a ten-part adaptation of Pamuk’s novel, novella almost, The Red-Haired Woman. This book, about a young man called Cem, is about many things, but chief among them is father-son relationships. An epigraph from Oedipus Rex hints that this is not going to be a father-son book in the jolly vein. Very listenable, though. As this episode opens Cem’s father has vanished and he is taken under the wing of a well digger called Mahmut.
The Essay: Forgetting, Modern Amnesia
Radio 3, 10.45pm
Of all the things that amaze modern readers about Homer’s Iliad — the nuance, the narrative boldness, the sheer gore of it — perhaps one of the most astonishing is what a feat of memorisation it represents. In ancient Greece there were rhapsodes who could remember all 15,693 lines of hexameter. As Professor Francis O’Gorman shows here, we have little need of such feats of memorisation today. Technology, which demands endless passwords and gives us the means to record and thus forget them, encourages us all to early amnesia.