BBC Three Launch
BBC Three, from 7pm
After a six-year interval in which it moved to an internet-only platform, the BBC’s dedicated channel for 16-to-34-year-olds returns to television with lots of fanfare but not much in the way of fresh programming. Things kick off with a 55-minute celebratory party, hosted on Radio 1 by Greg James and Clara Amfo, featuring appearances by the stars of Drag Race UK and The Rap Game, and with music from pop singer PinkPantheress. What follows, a double-bill of Eating with My Ex, is hardly going to win over any doubters.
And, at 9pm, a new spin on the hit series, RuPaul’s Drag Race: UK vs the World, (in which British drag artists take on global competition, with Mel C, Michelle Visage and Graham Norton assisting with wielding the axe), is nothing if not more of the same old thing. However, there is one bright new light: the short but perfectly formed Lazy Susan, at 10pm, a deliciously spiky sketch show written and performed by Celeste Dring and Freya Parker, with guest appearances by Lou Sanders, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, James Acaster and the like. Will BBC Three lure young people back to linear TV schedules? Or will it be banished back to cyberspace? GO
The Gilded Age
Sky Atlantic, 2am & 9pm
The curtain-twitching and withering put-downs continue in Julian Fellowes’s examination of high society in 1880s New York. Tonight, Mrs Russell (Carrie Coon) finds a chink in Mrs Morris’s (Katie Finneran) armour. When her alderman husband is tantalised by an invitation to lunch with the fantastically wealthy Russells, he insists they must attend – much to his snobbish wife’s chagrin.
Great British Menu
BBC Two, 8pm
After 17 frequently dreary series, the cookery competition gets a much-needed boost with a more-relatable-than-usual theme for the chefs to play with (popular TV shows, celebrating 100 years of British broadcasting) and a fresh trio of sharp-tongued judges – chefs Tom Kerridge and Nisha Katona, and comedian Ed Gamble – to wring extra flavour from the format. Andi Oliver returns as host.
The Decade the Rich Won
BBC Two, 9pm
From shock in Whitehall and on world markets at the Brexit referendum result, to the severe economic stresses of the pandemic, the concluding half of this documentary follows how events around the world conspired to ensure the global elite just kept on getting richer in recent years.
Obey Giant: The Art and Dissent of Shepard Fairey
Sky Arts, 9pm
Street artist Shepard Fairey (a kind of All-American Banksy) was propelled to fame by an Associated Press lawsuit accusing him of copyright breaches over a photo he’d used to make an image of Barack Obama that has since become iconic. In this self-promoting but interesting film he tells his side of the story.
Gabby Petito: The Murder That Gripped the World
Channel 5, 10pm
This unusual film uses the disjunction between real life and what gets posted on social media to explore a crime story that made headlines during lockdown: the disappearance of 22-year-old blogger Gabby Petito during an idyllic-seeming road trip across America.
On Assignment
ITV, 10.45pm; STV, 11.05pm; Wales, 11.10pm
Rageh Omaar’s news magazine show returns with reports from Austria, on resistance to their mandatory vaccination programme, Sicily, on the success of a regeneration scheme, and from Beirut, on the aftermath of the explosion that devastated its port in 2020.
The Unforgiven (1960) ★★★
5Action, 1.25pm
A respected family on the Texas frontier is thrown into sudden turmoil when a mysterious stranger (Joseph Wiseman) announces that the family’s adopted daughter (Audrey Hepburn) is actually from a Kiowa tribe. John Huston’s Western is a stirring film, and despite being riddled with problems behind the scenes – such as Hepburn falling off a horse and breaking her back – it puts the spotlight on racism against Native Americans.
Three Sisters (1970) ★★★★
Talking Pictures TV, 10.50pm
Based on the classic play by Anton Chekhov, this drama, directed by and starring Laurence Olivier, focuses on the three Prozorov sisters – Olga (Jeanne Watts), Masha (a wonderful turn from Joan Plowright) and Irina (Louise Purnell) – who long to escape their small town and return to Moscow, city of their youth. Olivier and Alan Bates play the men who love them: the family doctor, Chebutikin, and Colonel Vershinin.
Nuns on the Run (1990) ★★★
Film4, 11.15pm
Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane impersonate ladies of the habit in this raucous comedy about two men dodging the long arm of the law. It’s a modern interpretation of Some Like It Hot and there’s even a nod or two towards Monty Python in the cod theological debates. Idle and Coltrane, meanwhile, must get the best bad transvestites award in cinema for their slapstick bafflement and sheer lack of effort at being womanly.
Television previewers
Gerard O’Donovan (GO), Vicki Power (VP), Gabriel Tate (GT) and Jack Taylor (JT)
