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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Phil Harrison, Hannah Verdier, Graeme Virtue and Stuart Heritage

TV tonight: Ken Bruce grills celebrities in the ultimate music quiz

Sally Lindsay and MistaJam on Celebrity PopMaster TV.
Facing the music … Sally Lindsay and MistaJam on Celebrity PopMaster TV. Photograph: Jamie Simpson/Channel 4

Celebrity PopMaster TV

8pm, Channel 4
Ken Bruce’s amiable – if frequently pretty challenging – music quiz returns with a pair of celebrity editions. Can the people who earn their living from music retain the same exhaustive knowledge as the fans? This opener features Toyah Willcox, Richard Blackwood, Sally Lindsay, MistaJam and Kimberly Wyatt. Phil Harrison

Gardeners’ World

8pm, BBC Two
There is much to enjoy if you love to garden vicariously. Adam Frost adds a green roof to his log store, while Joe Swift meets a gardener making the most of a derelict space. Houseplant fans are catered for, too, with Arit Anderson meeting a true innovator. Hannah Verdier

A Kanneh-Mason Playlist at the Proms

8pm, BBC Four
Sheku and Braimah Kanneh-Mason join forces with the Brazilian guitarist Plínio Fernandes and the Fantasia Orchestra to perform a wildly varied selection of music in which Brahms rubs metaphorical shoulders with Bob Marley’s Redemption Song and Stan Getz’s The Girl from Ipanema. PH

Miriam Margolyes: A New Australian Adventure

9pm, BBC Two
What distinguishes Miriam Margolyes from most travel presenters is her unwillingness to gush. For example, she struggles with the commercialisation of one-time hippy paradise Byron Bay and the accompanying influx of “influencers”, a word she pronounces as if it carries a particularly foul smell. PH

Champions: Full Gallop

9pm, ITV1
Hot to trot: this horse-racing series has been a ratings hit right out of the gate. With only six weeks left in the jump season, focus shifts to the Cheltenham festival where trainer Dan Skelton hopes to close the gap on his former mentor: gee-gee whiz Paul Nicholls. Graeme Virtue

Terror at 30,000 Feet

9pm, Channel 5
This week’s incident is the plane that crash-landed on the M1 in 1989. While witnesses were horrified to spot an aircraft heading towards the motorway, recreated scenes on board the flight from Heathrow to Belfast show passengers preparing for an emergency landing. HV

Film choice

Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), 11.05pm, BBC Two
You can only pray that Children of Men will eventually stop being timely but, nearly 20 years since its release, that day has yet to come. Alfonso Cuarón’s film is set in a post-pandemic London where mass infertility has transformed the country into a police state. Clive Owen’s sad-sack bureaucrat is dragged into a battle against authority after witnessing a miracle. Owen has never been better on film, and Cuarón used the movie to pioneer a style of film-making full of long shots stitched together with invisible cuts that still feels revolutionary today. Stuart Heritage

The Instigators (Doug Liman, 2024), Apple TV+
Matt Damon has been quietly making a name for himself as king of the dad film. This is a new comedy thriller (reuniting him with his Bourne Identity director Doug Liman) about a mismatched pair of crooks who have to outrun various forces when a heist goes sideways, dragging their therapist along for the ride. The movie has a pleasingly old-school sensibility – you sense that Midnight Run was a touchstone – and a stacked cast includes Casey Affleck, Hong Chau and Ving Rhames. SH

Self Reliance (Jake Johnson, 2023), Paramount+
If ever there was a film that deserved to be seen by more people, it’s Self Reliance. Written and directed by its star, Jake Johnson (still probably best known for New Girl), this is a comedy thriller that, unusually for this sort of thing, manages to be funny and thrilling in equal measure. Johnson plays a man who agrees to be hunted by strangers for a dark web reality show. If he wins, he gets a million dollars. If he loses, he dies. It is an unbelievably self-assured directorial debut from Johnson, full of tremendous set pieces, and points to a bright future. If you liked The Game, you will love this. SH

Live sport

Olympics 2024, 8am, BBC One. Includes the B-girls breaking and 4x400m athletics relays.

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