Super-Powered Owls: Natural World
8pm, BBC2
Say what you like about owls: maintaining a solid profile in the animal kingdom despite most people not seeing a single example from one year to the next deserves a doff of the cap. These stately, wondrous birds and their natural “super powers” are fully explored over an affectionate hour, pivoting around Lloyd and Rose Buck, bird-handlers extraordinaire, raising two barn owl chicks in their own home. The footage, as well as the devotion of the Bucks, is enthralling. Ben Arnold
Bargain Fever Britain
8pm, ITV
The recession may purportedly be behind us, but half of the UK are still shopping at discount stores. As shown in this new series profiling four major discounters, if it’s a bargain, we’ll buy it; cue scenes of Costco customers heroically wrestling 8ft teddy bears out of the store. Elsewhere, Approved Foods boss Dan Cluderay explains how he’s turning a healthy profit from food that’s past its best-before date: “I’ve got some honey at home that’s older than my five-year-old son.” Ali Catterall
Horizon: Secrets of the Solar System
9pm, BBC2
Everything in its right place, the planets from untenably hot to unbearably small and cold, all orbiting the sun in an orderly fashion: we think we know the solar system. The more we learn, however, and the closer we get to the sun and its chaotic electromagnetic firestorm, the more complicated it all seems. This popular science doc investigates some of that chaos and shows how new light is being cast on how the sun, planets, comets and all the other celestial guys came into being. John Robinson
World’s Toughest Jobs
9pm, BBC3
No one is under the illusion that working on a trawler in the Arctic Circle is anything other than gruelling, odour-heavy graft, but when the remuneration is this sturdy – some trawlermen can earn £75,000 in six months – it’s enough to tempt even the most liverish land lubber. Enter Jess, Jamie and Carl, three skint young Brits keen to give it a whirl and maybe change their lives. Carl is impossible to dislike, particularly when he throws himself into gutting fish with such vim. Jess is markedly less enthusiastic. Ben Arnold
Critical
9pm, Sky1
The hour of power continues with the team battling to save a woman who has been impaled on a fence post. Glen Boyle (Line Of Duty’s Lennie James) saunters in and he’s in no mood to chat, but he has history with one of the trauma team. A look through the victim’s last texts explain how she got there, but will she make it through? This real-time medical drama is intriguing, engrossing and sometimes difficult to watch unless you can stomach seeing someone being “unpacked”. Slick, well-acted and brilliant. Hannah Verdier
Drugs Live: Cannabis On Trial
10pm, Channel 4
You’ve seen the slightly questionable promo, in which Jon Snow huffed enough skunk to stun a yak at 7am in a hospital, and understandably got the heebie-jeebies. Now here’s a fuller investigation into the dangers of cannabis, hosted live by Snow and Dr Christian Jessen, with scientific input from pharmacologist Val Curran and former government drugs adviser David Nutt. Should the millions of Britons who had a toke last year be more circumspect? The other celebrity guinea pigs are Matthew Parris and Jennie Bond. Jack Seale
No Place To Call Home
10.45pm, BBC1
Infuriating but important depiction of the bottom of London’s deranged housing ladder where, as this film demonstrates, the gap between the ground and the first rung has widened beyond the reach of far too many people. The film spends a year with two families attempting to cling on to their lives in the capital, as rents spiral and property prices vanish into the stratospheres. At least 60,000 London children are in temporary accommodation, an uncountably larger number sleeping on sofas or stacked in borrowed spare rooms. Andrew Mueller
Today’s best live sport
• Strongest Man: Giants Live
Strongman action from Leeds (5.30pm, British Eurosport).
• Premier League Football: Aston Villa v West Bromwich Albion
The reliably lively West Midlands derby at Villa Park (7pm, BT Sport 1).
• German Cup Football: Dynamo Dresden v Borussia Dortmund
Last-16 action from the Glücksgas Stadium (7.30pm, BT Sport 2).
• Cricket World Cup: Pakistan v United Arab Emirates
Action from Napier in New Zealand (12.30am, Sky Sports World Cup).
