Friday’s best TV

Barging Round Britain with John Sergeant. Photograph: ITV

Secret Knowledge: In Search Of Rory McEwen
7.30pm, BBC4

His live music TV show was dedicated to folk, blues and world music, he’d sometimes join in with the performers, and he once cut a single called Hootenannie. Nope, not Jools Holland, but his father-in-law, the late Rory McEwen – who, at the height of his TV success in the 60s, walked away from it all to start painting incredible pictures of flowers and plants. A fascinating, delightful tribute to the man Van Morrison says changed his mind about becoming a vet. Ali Catterall

Barging Round Britain With John Sergeant
8pm, ITV

It’s hard to believe that this smiling man in a Panama hat used to spend his days at Westminster. John Sergeant now looks born to present soothingly inessential travelogues. Here, he pootles along British waterways, meeting locals who have historical knowledge to share or a small business to plug. First it’s the Leeds and Liverpool canal, and a friendly lesson on the days we made stuff and exported it. Sergeant, soft and fruity like your favourite nan, is delighted. Jack Seale

Flintoff: Lord Of The Fries
8pm, Sky1

Classic get-a-puntastic-title-and-work-backwards telly as Flintoff kicks off a new series touring the UK and Ireland in a mobile chip shop. Because he’s Lord of the Fries, ha, ha! Accompanying him in his eco-friendly chip van powered by cooking fat is cyclist Rob Penn. The journey begins in Freddie’s local chippy back on the Lancaster estate where he grew up. Then the duo set off on the search for great food and local characters, taking in Whitby in the summer and the nation’s most picturesque service station. Hannah Verdier

Italy Unpacked
9pm, BBC2

One does art criticism, one does cooking, both do adjectives. Which is another way of saying Andrew Graham-Dixon and Giorgio Locatelli are back for another road trip through Italy, this time travelling up the east coast. We begin in Matera, where the dwellings in the spectacular old town of Sassi are caves, some in use for thousands of years. Throughout, Graham-Dixon and Locatelli narrowly avoid The Trip-style self-parody, but it’s a delightful series to still the midwinter chill nonetheless. Jonathan Wright

Benidorm
9pm, ITV

Enjoyable and amusing end to the season, as some long-running plotlines are resolved. Ruth Madoc, star of 80s holiday camp sitcom Hi-de-Hi!, continues her second career as a camp icon as she makes a guest appearance as Glynn’s wife Rhiannon, relieved their “wife swap” holiday is at an end. Clive’s luck doesn’t seem to be getting any better when he invests unwisely in Spanish property – happily he, Tiger and Terri come up with a plan to get his money back. It’s not all good news: Mateo’s mother-in-law wants to kill him. John Robinson

NCIS: New Orleans
9pm, Channel 5

A feature-length episode of NCIS ushers in this spin-off series, based amid the humid – and handily evocative – heat of New Orleans. Local NCIS special agent Dwayne “King” Pride (Scott “Quantum Leap” Bakula) is called in when a congressman and former NCIS agent is found with his throat slashed. Somewhat conveniently as far as dramatic jeopardy is goes, it happens he mentored King back in the day. NCIS boss man Leroy Gibbs is soon in town, too. The sketchy southern accents here are something to behold. Ben Arnold

30 Degrees In February
9pm, Sky Arts 1

New Scandi drama with barely a woolly jumper in sight. This justifiably popular series literally departs from bleak, snowy terrain as a handful of Swedish characters seek a new life and an infusion of far eastern warmth in Thailand. It’s not exactly Benidorm. Tonight, we meet the main protagonists, including a truculent ex-pilot who uses a wheelchair, whose wife finds herself arrested at a Thai airport, and a lonely, chunky engineer seeking a Thai bride who represents himself online with a picture of George Clooney. David Stubbs