Viewing guide, by Alexi Duggins
Britain’s Favourite Walks: Top 100
ITV, 7.30pm
Hot on the heels of its countdown of the nation’s favourite dogs, ITV gives the ranking treatment to enjoyably walkable bits of nature. Supposedly the biggest survey to date of the nation’s hiking preferences (8,000 people voted), it’s surely the recipient of the largest chunk of primetime television scheduling, with ITV devoting two and a half hours to the Strictly Come Dancing winner Ore Oduba and the former Countryfile presenter Julia Bradbury touring Britain to tread the routes. In terms of dramatic camera footage, it’s certainly a winner. There are plenty of spectacular aerial shots of idyllic bays, bucolic scenes of dappled, russet trees and time-lapsed mountainscapes featuring scudding clouds casting shadows over the dramatic crags of the Peak District. Given that a television programme feels like a fairly non-user-friendly format in which to consume an encyclopaedic guide to walking routes (unless your idea of fun is attempting to extract useful information by pausing and rewinding), you have to assume that the idea is to stir up viewers’ passions for local routes. Hence, presumably, them interviewing cheerleaders for the walks, which — this being ITV — involves various celebrities (Adrian Edmondson traipsing across a 12,000-year-old limestone pavement in Yorkshire; Katherine Kelly from Happy Valley eating tuna sandwiches on a Peak District hill) and people with inspirational stories linked to the routes (an Alzheimer’s sufferer who walks in the Lake District to feel normal; a Welsh adventurer who scattered her mother’s ashes on a mountain after she’d died of cancer and now climbs it in her memory). As for which walk wins, we wouldn’t want to ruin that for you.
Further recommendations
If you missed last week’s comparable marathon countdown, Britain’s Favourite Dogs: Top 100, it’s available on ITV Hub
Art, Passion & Power: The Story of the Royal Collection
BBC Four, 9pm
The joy of this continuing series about the royal family’s art collection is the unbridled excitability of the art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon. As he takes us from George IV’s building of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton through to Queen Victoria’s final album of drawings and watercolours, the word “Wow!” is never far from his lips. He guffaws as he points out a nodding Qing dynasty figurine, becomes wide-eyed at the interior of a Buckingham Palace desk and waves his arms around in glee upon entering Windsor Castle’s Waterloo Chamber to the sound of him shouting out “Dah dah dah dum!” in an attempt to create his own Beethoven soundtrack. His passion for the subject is vast and his enthusiasm is infectious.
Inside No 9
BBC Two, 10pm
Will Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s series of twisty, stand-alone half-hour dramas put a foot wrong? As the fourth series begins to draw to a close, it’s hard to think of an underwhelming episode and tonight’s is no exception as it neatly sends up the navel-gazing egotism of TV industry awards panels. Zoë Wanamaker exudes charisma as a jaded West End veteran who never bothers to watch the nominees she’s expected to vote for, while the rest of the panel dissolve into a mess of shallow image-based judgments and patronising comments about viewers’ intelligence. Astute and very funny, if unlikely to do them any favours with the Bafta panel.
Murdered for Love? Samia Shahid
BBC Two, 9pm
The tale of the alleged honour killing of a Bradford woman, Samia Shahid, is told in this moving, thoughtful documentary with a narrative driven by those closest to her. “We are her voice, speaking for her today, because she would have done the same,” says one of her friends in the interviews that make up this programme, along with extensive use of photos, social media posts and audio notes from Shahid. A vivid portrait of a big-hearted woman who risked her life for love, annulling her arranged marriage and marrying the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.
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Can You Rebuild My Brain?
Channel 4, 10pm
Lotje Sodderland is no stranger to brain-related documentary-making after being the subject of Netflix’s 2014 documentary My Beautiful Broken Brain, which chronicled her rehabilitation from brain damage after a near-fatal stroke at the age of 34. Here, she travels the world to observe scientists making revolutionary attempts to fix damaged brains, bringing an endearing earnestness to proceedings as a result of the intensified emotions caused by her stroke. It’s touching viewing, but despite most of the techniques profiled being non-surgical, this is a Channel 4 documentary about medical procedures, so there is one shot of surgery porn: a drill-bit bursting a skull, while fluids erupt like Icelandic geysers.
Catch-up TV, by Joe Clay
Millionaires’ Ex-Wives Club
BBC iPlayer, to February 16
London is the divorce capital of the world, the city where the mega-rich come to hammer out the division of their fortunes when the marriage goes awry. The more money at stake, the bigger the war, and Lynn Alleway’s insightful documentary explores some of the private battles involved in high-net-worth divorce cases. One of Alleway’s subjects is 51-year-old Lisa Tchenguiz. She has been divorced twice (her first marriage to the former Radio 1 DJ Gary Davies ended amicably), and she was already a wealthy woman before she got married. That didn’t stop her from fighting her second husband, the Del Monte chief Vivian Imerman, for her share of their fortune.
Film choice, by Kate Muir
12 Angry Men (U, 1957)
Film4, 2.55pm
There’s no more perfect chamber piece, minute for minute, than this tense, smart and devastating courtroom drama. Sidney Lumet’s film stars Henry Fonda as the sole juror in a dozen who refuses to send a young Puerto Rican man to his death for killing his father. Fonda believes there is reasonable doubt in the case and American law requires a unanimous verdict. Reluctantly, the jury (and the in-your-face camera) hole up to deliberate in a back room on what seems to be the hottest day of the year in New York. The white-suited Fonda (Juror 8) keeps his powder dry while all around begin to waver in their resolve, and a re-examination of the case reveals flaws, suppositions and lies in the testimony, all in real time. (92min)
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East is East (15, 1999)
More4, 9pm
This engaging cross-cultural comedy of manners was a surprise hit at the box office. Om Puri tackles the complex and conflicted role of George Khan, born in Pakistan but living in 1970s Salford with an English wife (Linda Bassett) and seven children. He is determined that his offspring shall be raised strictly according to Muslim principles, although in practice he has developed a rather more flexible relationship with his religious doctrines. The writer Ayub Khan-Din adapted the screenplay from his own semi-autobiographical play. Despite playing 14-year-old Meenah, Archie Panjabi was 26 at the time of filming. (96min) Wendy Ide
Chef (15, 2014)
Film4, 11.05pm
For years the chef Carl Casper (Jon Favreau, who also writes and directs) has run the celebrated Los Angeles restaurant Gauloises, but when a food blogger trashes his signature dishes he flies into a rage that goes viral on YouTube. Out of a job, Casper takes his media-savvy ten-year-old son with him on a road trip to Miami, where he pimps up a clapped-out street-food catering truck. You can feel your arteries hardening as Casper slaps butter on the grill and fries up the white bread, the marinated pork and the cheese into a sweating, golden crust. The son tweets their progress and the crowds come a-slavering. (114min)
Radio choice, by Catherine Nixey
A Good Read
Radio 4, 4.30pm
In the game of Radio 4 bingo, this episode of A Good Read is a full house. The presenter Harriett Gilbert has a voice that is the audio equivalent of a pair of brogues (slightly of another era, but stylish, despite, or perhaps because of that). It has good books (Muriel Spark and Aldous Huxley) and it has (and this would have you lifting your bingo card aloft) Stephen Fry. Fry has picked Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s a good choice; one of those books whose pages has been so well-thumbed over the years its words have become smudged and obscure. Most people remember that in it people are separated into Alphas and Betas, but Fry reminds us of the rest of it. Huxley’s New World is a place in which the true fear is not tyranny, but infantilism and where people are encouraged to play games to forget reality. You can see why Fry picked it.
The Essay: Looking Good
Radio 3, 10.45pm
How often do you look at things? Really look at them, rather than just see them? That is what five thinkers are considering in this week’s essays. In the first we had the art historian James Fox talking about the sun and sounding at once sweetly earnest and slightly as though he’d swallowed the science dictionary (“It bombards every square metre of the planet with a hundred billion photons a second . . .”). Today it’s Lauren Elkin looking at people’s walks and seeing not mere locomotion, but “a blueprint of our emotional lives”.