CRITIC’S CHOICE
Breathtaking
9pm, ITV1
As the official Covid inquiry grinds on, this powerful three-part drama looks at how frontline medical staff coped as government and NHS management dithered in March 2020. Adapted by Line Of Duty creator Jed Mercurio and former doctor Rachel Clarke from Clarke’s book, it stars Joanne Froggatt as Abbey Henderson, a doctor in a big city hospital fighting the virus. Intercut with Boris Johnson spouting his line in sub-Churchillian platitudes about “defeating” the virus, this opening episode finds the hospital acutely short of PPE (nurses fashioning their own protective clothes from bin bags) and testing only allowed for patients with a travel history. Abbey meanwhile worries about infecting her family back home.
The Way
9pm, BBC One
Revolution is in the air in this unusual new three-part drama co-created by James Graham
(Quiz, Sherwood) and Adam Curtis
(Hypernormalisation, The Power Of Nightmares), and marking the directorial debut of Michael Sheen. Given last month’s news about massive job cuts at Port Talbot steelworks, it proves timely as a strike at the Welsh steelworks featured here sparks unrest across the country. Members of the Driscoll family (played variously by Steffan Rhodri, Callum Scott Howells, Sophie Driscoll and Mali Harries) find themselves on opposing sides as a civil uprising threatens to engulf the country.
The Space Shuttle
That Fell To Earth
9pm, BBC Two
“Columbia is in great shape and working perfectly,” the doomed space shuttle commander Rick Husband reported once they had reached orbit. However, as the inside story of the 2003 Columbia disaster continues, we learn how Nasa engineers had analysed film footage of a piece of debris striking the shuttle 81 seconds after launch. The team concluded that the piece of foam was not a safety risk, but when time came for the shuttle to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere, anomalies began being reported to Mission Control.
Katherine Ryan:
Parental Guidance
9pm, W
Aside from being a parenting guide, it’s now clear that this series is a type of semi-comedic reality show about Katherine Ryan’s home life. As Ryan’s mother, Julie, arrives from Canada to help with the childcare (a nanny and a stay-at-home husband obviously not enough), Ryan herself visits an activist mother who takes her children on protests against fossil fuels. Burning rather a lot of fossil fuels are the parents who take their kids out of school to travel.
Ukraine’s War:
The Other Side
10.45pm, ITV1
Western reporting from the Russian side of the war in Ukraine has been understandably sparse. Sean Langan, who is no stranger to dangerous war zones (he was famously abducted by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008) managed to gain entry to the Russian occupied Donbas region in eastern Ukraine for this fascinating insight into life and death in cities like Donetsk and Luhansk. Greeted with universal suspicion, he meets civilians living under siege and Russian soldiers under a steady barrage of artillery and rocket fire to find out what life is like. Gerard Gilbert