Marco's Great British Feast, ITV1, 9pm
A rum dish, Marco's Great British Feast, judged by the first of its four weekly courses. Sporadically piquant, but I'm not sure I can swallow all of it. This is on account of its host, of course, one-time Francophile enfant terrible of the kitchen Marco Pierre White.
Coronation Street ITV1, 7.30pm and 8.30pm
Criminal Justice, BBC1, 9pm
As the late Fred Elliott, Coronation Street's own Foghorn Leghorn, might have put it: "Ah seh we allus knew daft Liz shouldn't 'ave wed gormless Vernon Tomlin, ah seh we allus knew."
Casualty, BBC1, 8.50pm (Saturday)
The Royal, Channel, 8pm
You always get a more multi-layered and emotionally complex type of accident in Casualty, don't you? Take Saturday's example. It erupted around Jo, who'd been out shopping in a Holby retail mall but had grown distressed by the unwelcome attentions of a chap whom she perceived to be a loitering lurker. She took refuge in the mall's disability lavvy, only to find herself discomfited by the noisy arrival of a disabled woman, Maxine, who was engaged in a bitter domestic squabble with her daughter.
One bizarre bisexual love triangle.
Two illegitimate children, one fathered in 1959, the other in 1998. Two marriages. Countless instances of
sexual shenanigans.
Legend of the crystal skulls: Revealed
Five, 8pm
Supersizers go... regency
BBC2, 9pm
IF, like me, you've recently been to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you'll have come away with mixed feelings.
Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick were a couple whose forbidden marital passion derived its greatest erotic thrill from being conducted in total secrecy. Their marriage lasted for 36 years, from 1873 until Hannah’s death in 1909.
How TV Changed Britain
Channel 4, 8pm
Tony Robinson's Crime and Punishment
Channel 4, 7pm
A mild comic exercise in cod-sociology, How TV Changed Britain trawled through 46 years of residential property programmes. Stephen Mangan's entertainingly sarky voice-over alleged that Barry Bucknell, an uncertain-seeming presenter who scorned the scandalous informality of overalls, was the fellow who did most to wreak lasting physical damage on a nation's homes.
House: Five, 9pm
Heroes: BBC2, 9pm
IT was a mighty risky plotline: would House pull it off? To recap: House is a glossy-looking and unspeakably preposterous TV melodrama set in an unbelievably all-action New Jersey hospital, Princeton-Plainsboro.
Tribal Wives
BBC2, 9pm
Wife Swap USA
Channel 4, 11.05pm
As Tribal Wives attested, 800 lovely people live in palm-roofed huts on one of the tiny coral San Blas Islands just off Panama's coast. Members of the Kuna tribe, they live their lives in easeful acceptance of nature. "That is how it is," goes the refrain to a Kuna prayer chant.
Last of the Dambusters: revealed Five, 8pm
PROCLAIMING itself "a journey into the past to confront the full truth", Last of the Dambusters: Revealed trudged 86-year-old great-grandfather George "Johnny" Johnson around various fields in the Somme and the Ruhr valley. For various reasons - not the least being respect for the physical wellbeing of a man not in the first flush of youth - this was a not-altogether-edifying TV spectacle, although it was certainly a grimly compelling one.
Terrestrial
Location, Location, Location
Channel 4, 8pm
Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer help find a house in north-west London for Tony and Michelle on a paltry budget of £900,000, also
aiding first-time buyers Amy and Takbir to find a shoebox for £250,000.
The Father, The Son and The Housekeeper: Storyville
BBC4, 9pm
Dickens's Secret Lover
Channel 4, 9pm
IN 1991, student film-maker Alison
Millar began a year recording the everyday life of Ireland's favourite and most media-friendly priest, Father Michael Cleary, in the Dublin home run by his housekeeper, Phyllis Hamilton. It also housed her teenage son, Ross.
On the plus side, Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley was a light-hearted drama which truly worked the magic of theatrical storytelling by eliciting sympathy for its cold, ruthless, fiercely ambitious and utterly
self-absorbed subject.
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