Saturday 11 September
Merlin
7.25pm, BBC1
Merlin rescues Morgana from marauding bandits with his flashing eye magic, only to have Arthur put a bucket of soapy water over his head. So begins a new series of everyone's favourite medieval adventure in which Morgana, looking like an evil version of Andrea Corr, uses all kinds of sorcery to wreak terrible vengeance on the kingdom of Uther Pendragon. And to make matters worse, her sister, played with malevolent glee by Emilia Fox, is helping her. Merlin has rumbled her game, but who's going to believe him? A tense cliffhanger leaves us guessing.
71 Degrees North
9pm, ITV1
9/11: State Of Emergency
9pm, Channel 4
An Idiot Abroad – The Preview Show
9pm, Sky1
Edinburgh Comedy Fest Live
9.10pm, BBC3
Blade: The Series
10pm, Five USA
Sunday 12 September
Heroes
8pm, BBC1
Heartbeat
8pm, ITV1
Albert's Memorial
9pm, ITV1
A Journey Back To Newcastle: Michael Smith's Deep North
9.30pm, BBC4
The Hard Times Of RJ Berger
10pm, MTV
Sharon Osbourne's Charm School
11pm, Viva
Kate Thornton and Gethin Jones present a new celebrity challenge show from a Norwegian glacier. Ten of them compete in sub-zero physical challenges, five against five, and the winning team gets to spend the night in luxury while the losers pitch camp in the icy terribleness. The point of the show is unclear. To see how Shane Richie functions in Arctic conditions, perhaps? It's made triply annoying by the presence of Kate Thornton all wrapped up in a warm coat.Narrated by Jason Isaacs, this is a straight-up recount of the events surrounding the collapse of the twin towers, featuring interviews with Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld among others. Threaded through, however, are the stories of firefighters, air traffic controllers and others whose actions saved lives – if not necessarily their own, as in the case of flight attendant Betty Ong, who phoned through the first alert about the hijacking of the doomed Flight 11. Nine years on, the footage still has you gasping in appalled, harrowed fascination.The titular halfwit is Karl Pilkington, currently making a career from being the dim sidekick of Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant. The conceit of this ball-achingly dull series is that Pilkington is dispatched to exotic locales to gawp gormlessly at the locals and whinge drearily about what a rotten time he's having, while Gervais and Merchant goad him by phone. Tonight, it's a preview show, with clips of him in China and Brazil ahead of his trip to India next week. At what meeting was it decided that TV wants travel programmes presented by self-absorbed morons?The "Live" in the title is a bit of a misnomer as the Fringe has been over for weeks but, nevertheless, these two shows – hosted by Glaswegian comic Kevin Bridges – showcase some of the biggest names gracing the festival, including breakout Liverpudlian John Bishop, the deadpan wit of Mark Watson, the always entertaining Sean Lock and newer lights such as Jack Whitehall. It could do with a few more of those nominated for the Foster's Awards like Bo Burnham and Josie Long, but it's still a strong lineup.There's always something slightly comical about seeing a rapper use their "street" name in credits, but Sticky Fingaz (born Kirk Jones) is deadly serious and quite effective in the title role of this comic-to-film-to-TV adventure. Mr Fingaz takes over from Wesley Snipes as the "manpire" Blade, hunting down the vamps who polluted his blood when he was still in the womb. Like most genre shows, it fumbles a lot in setting up the world and characters, but stick with it: after a few weeks it hits its stride and is a good antidote to the rather soppy bloodsuckers of True Blood and Twilight.Coverage of the spectacular for our boys, which attempts to provide the next best form of assistance to actually bringing them home. Musical acts include Alexandra Burke, Enrique Iglesias and James Blunt, which might prompt some to wonder if the troops have not suffered enough, while Peter Kay, Jason Manford and Jack Dee are among the comedians probably providing the better bet, entertainment-wise. Coverage also includes interviews with servicemen and women, and a rare TV appearance from Bruce Forsyth.It's not been a good year for Yorkshire-set TV institutions. Following on from the final Last Of The Summer Wine, here's the last Heartbeat. You can see why it's been retired. This is a show that long ago found a formula – boy-next-door lead, locals doing the funniest things, hints of darkness in the crime-driven stories – and decided to stick with it. Even tonight's offering, with its overarching theme of cold war espionage, hardly a Heartbeat staple, invites the indiscriminate use of the S-word: shenanigans. The bloke with the scythe steals the show.Drama in which the Davids, Jason and Warner, fulfil their friend's dying wish to be buried on the German battlefield where they fought together in the second world war. Shocking then that such prized talent was let loose on what feels like an unfinished script. In particular, the plot twist involving one character is so mind-bendingly childish it'll cause incredulous eye-rubbing and mass rewinding of digi-boxes just to check it was real. What could have been a touching story of friendship and loss is actually quite embarrassing.No one waxes so nostalgically and affectionately about the place of their birth as those who have long since ceased to live there. Culture Show regular and novelist Michael Smith, now resident in London, returns to Newcastle, from where he muses lyrically on the many and varied tribes you find up north: a Baltic-style spread of plural identities ranging from scouser to geordie in cities preserved by their rural surroundings; not like the south, dominated by the all-sucking influence of the capital city.You could be thinking that high school was played out as a venue for US comedy, but RJ Berger does a pretty good job of injecting new life into the tired formula. Refreshingly, the show seems to know what it's up against. Essentially The Wonder Years with added masturbation jokes, the series returns again and again to its central theme of the nerdy RJ's difficulties with girls – and this third episode only compounds his problems. When he auditions for a school musical, Vamp Side Story, he ends up scoring a lead role.As a reward for narrowly dodging the chance to be Mrs Bret Michaels on MTV's Rock Of Love, 14 contestants from that show are handed over to the loving care of Sharon Osbourne, who will teach them the necessary skills and etiquette every young lady will need to know in order to bag a rock star husband. It's off to a flying, screeching start as the women almost come to blows over who gets what room to sleep in, then one of the hopeless hopefuls rolls up drunk. A contestant has since filed a lawsuit against the host, which is all the recommendation a show like this needs.
