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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Hollie Richardson, Selim Bulut, Ellen E Jones, Alexi Duggins, Jack Seale and Simon Wardell

TV tonight: a race across Canada with no smartphones, internet or credit cards

The five pairs competing in Race Across the World, including Tricia and Cathie (third and fourth from left)
On your marks … The five pairs competing in Race Across the World, including Tricia and Cathie (third and fourth from left). Photograph: Mackenzie Walker/BBC

Race Across the World

9pm, BBC One

Back for a third series, this time five teams set off on an adventure across Canada. They must visit seven checkpoints as they journey from Vancouver to the most easterly town in North America, St John’s. The catch? They have no smartphones, internet or credit cards, and only a small wad of cash. This week, best mates Tricia and Cathie struggle to leave the starting point of Stanley Park. Hollie Richardson

Kirstie and Phil’s Love It Or List It: Brilliant Builds

8pm, Channel 4

The least entertaining incarnation of property’s porn bickering duo is their attempts to look back on previous work. That’s what you get with this week’s retrospective on two couples deciding whether or not to extend. Informative but not exactly new. Alexi Duggins

Saving Lives in Leeds

9pm, BBC Two

Surgeons operating in Saving Lives in Leeds
Snapshot of the NHS … Saving Lives in Leeds. Photograph: Ryan McNamara/BBC/Label1

This documentary series provides a snapshot of the NHS as it grapples with the longest national waiting list in history, with onscreen title cards regularly offering bleak reminders of how long each patient has been waiting for surgery. In this week’s episode, we see a plastic surgeon attempt to stop an anxious cancer patient from absconding. Selim Bulut

The Bay

9pm, ITV1

As the investigation into the horrific arson murder of poor Mrs Metcalf progresses, her grieving children struggle with the fallout. Meanwhile DS Townsend (Marsha Thomason) is collecting shifty suspects like so many barnacles on Morecambe’s beach groynes. But how to sort the flotsam from the jetsam? Ellen E Jones

Django

9pm, Sky Atlantic

The heavy use of flashback can drag a drama down, but this week the western spin-off does at least dig to the core of Sarah (Lisa Vicari) and her brutal past. Django (Matthias Schoenaerts), meanwhile, is entangling himself with racist mercenaries who will, in the drama’s present day, come back to haunt him. Jack Seale

The Cockfields

10pm, BBC Two

Originally aired on Gold, this whimsical sitcom from 2019 stars Joe Wilkinson as Simon, a 40-year-old bringing his girlfriend (Diane Morgan) home to meet the family. Mum (Sue Johnston) and stepdad (Bobby Ball) are embarrassing, but it’s nothing that can’t be resolved by a few fart gags. EJ

Film choice

Lucy (Hailee Cruzen) and Jerry (Glenn Howerton) in The Thief Collector.
Stealing scenes … Lucy (Hailee Cruzen) and Jerry (Glenn Howerton) in The Thief Collector. Photograph: Signature

The Thief Collector (Allison Otto, 2022), Prime Video
Allison Otto’s deliciously speculative documentary tells the peculiar story of Jerry and Rita Alter. A firm clearing the couple’s New Mexico house after their deaths found a Willem de Kooning painting stolen 30 years earlier. So who were the globetrotting music teacher and his speech therapist wife? The truth remains tantalisingly out of reach, but with reconstructions played for laughs and excerpts from Jerry’s possibly autobiographical crime fiction, it’s an entertaining thread to follow. Simon Wardell

Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016), 12.50am, Film4
When arch provocateur Paul Verhoeven teamed up with the risk-taking Isabelle Huppert for this 2016 French drama, the shock value was guaranteed to be high. Huppert stars as Michèle, the co-owner of a company that creates violent video games, who is raped in her home by a masked intruder. With a mistrust of the police born of her horrific family history, she doesn’t report the attack; indeed, she is intrigued, if not turned on, by her feelings about it. In the magnetic Huppert’s hands, Michèle’s fear, anger and desire are conflated in a dark thriller that challenges women-in-peril tropes. SW

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