Incredible Engineering Blunders: Fixed
8pm, Discovery
In a new series, perky engineer and journalist Justin Cunningham looks at engineering mishaps from around the world and offers up a few solutions. First up, it’s the maligned Glasgow Tower, which has been closed for much of the time since it opened in 2001 because of a persistent problem with the bearings that make it rotate. Then it’s off to Japan in an attempt to find out why Osaka’s Kansai airport, which was built on a man-made island, is now slowly but surely sinking into the sea. Ben Arnold
OAP Internet Virgins
8pm, Sky1
The silver surfer series continues with Theresa, now living in the UK but originally from Grenada. She longs to communicate with the family back home, but technology is not her friend and a tablet is something she takes for a headache. Can beauty vlogger (it’s a job) Charlotte bring the 71-year-old into the modern era – or will she simply end up emitting frustrated sobs over an unresponsive iPad? It’s a “thing”, obviously, but the elderly accessing the internet is not the most visual of subjects. Julia Raeside
Building The Ancient City: Athens And Rome
8pm, BBC2
The thesis that what we think of as modern western civilisation gestated in Athens and was delivered in Rome is scarcely an original one but – for precisely that reason – these are fascinating periods. In this two-part series, historian Andrew Wallace-Hadrill explores the moral, legal and physical foundations of the two cities. He begins in Athens, which pioneered the idea that power resided with the people more than two millennia before democracy became Europe’s default setting. Andrew Mueller
Flockstars
8.30pm, ITV
It is strange to find yourself thinking, “Those sheep have really responded to the authority being demonstrated by Kelle from Eternal,” but that’s part of the strange and highly selective appeal of Flockstars – basically One Minor Celebrity And Their Dog. Up to a point, it’s all about the seriousness. True enough, it’s a bit much when Gabby Logan tries to get the stars to say what they’ve “learned from the experience” but still. You can’t fake the skills needed and you certainly wouldn’t want them to flunk out on Topiary Corner. John Robinson
Trapped In A Cult?
9pm, Channel 5
An old chestnut, this – as those with memories of groups like the Moonies will recall – but nonetheless a scary one, especially in the internet age. This show tells the horror stories of ordinary British people who have become ensnared in cults. The adolescent desire to escape family ties is a common theme – one mother talks about how her teenage son cut himself off from her having joined an online group, while another woman relates how the “guru” under whose sway she fell was later imprisoned for rape. David Stubbs
Who Do You Think You Are?
9pm, BBC1
Jane Seymour may for ever be associated with a certain plucky US medicine woman patching up frontiersmen and Cheyenne natives in 19th-century Colorado but her heritage is solidly European. The film and TV star born Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg explores her father’s Polish roots, specifically the fate of two great aunts, each caught up in “a life of fleeing” during the second world war. The trail threatens to go cold, but Seymour remains undeterred, criss-crossing Warsaw in a fetching babushka hat. Graeme Virtue
Very British Problems
9pm, Channel 4
In which mostly grumpy and sometimes quite old celebs reflect on the problems that ensue when leaving the house to go to work or the shops, or even to head out on holiday or for a jolly. In more detail, that means the likes of James Corden, Jonathan Ross, Ruth Jones and Stephen Mangan discussing the guilty thrill of buying a cheap round down the pub, the seething anger that underpins making tea for office colleagues, and performance anxiety – when packing shopping at the supermarket. Jonathan Wright
Film choice
Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005) 9pm, Sky Arts
When a well-off Parisian (Daniel Auteuil) receives videotapes that suggest he is being spied on, a shameful episode from his past bubbles up. Haneke’s enigmatic thriller is both a complex exploration of middle-class liberal guilt and a merciless portrait of a disintegrating marriage, played out with painful conviction by Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. Paul Howlett
Today’s best live sport
Test Cricket: The Ashes With the England team’s hands already on the urn, Alastair Cook and his team begin a lap of honour with some incidental cricket thrown in at the Oval. 10am, Sky Sports Ashes
Horse Racing: The Ebor festival Coverage of the four-day race meeting at York Racecourse. 1.35pm, Channel 4
Rugby League: St Helens v Huddersfield Giants Coverage of the Super 8s encounter at Langtree Park in west Lancashire. 7.30pm, Sky Sports 1
