Ah, three days after those New Year's Resolutions kicked in, and television is already helping us to wriggle out of them - so if that diet has got dull already, a good dose of Superslim Me: Best and Worst Diets (Channel 4, 8pm) should sort that out, and you can be back on the doughnuts by nine.
Also on offer tonight, BBC1's showing What Women Want (useful to watch if you made a resolution to find out the inner workings of the female mind this year - it's scientifically proven to be exactly correct. Fact), while Five revels in Shocking Celebrity Moments 2005, useful if your New Year's Resolutions were mainly concerned with painful atonement for past sins through the medium of watching hideously cringeworthy television countdown shows.
There is more palatable fare to be had, of course, and you can find out what these are by checking out tonight's picks, taken from this week's Guide...
Superslim Me: Best And Worst Diets 8pm, C4 New year, new slimming resolution? In among a plethora of good intentions programming, 10 guinea pigs test out the top 10 diets in British history. Will the Atkins, GI and Beverly Hills diets actually work? Lorraine Kelly hosts as each regime is checked out scientifically, both in terms of weight loss and the possibility of short or long-term health risks. Along the way, the show reveals some scary facts about the diet industry, an industry that's worth billions of pounds a year in the UK. The likes of Antony Worrall Thompson and Annabelle Croft provide soundbites.
Jonathan Wright
Rome 9pm, BBC2 The sex and sandals epic concludes with a head-rolling double bill. Pullo descends into the underworld, hiring himself as a "knife man", while Vorenus's star ascends further and he becomes common man exception/example in good society, until his old mate is thrown into the arena. Cue more head-on decapitations. Elsewhere Brutus struggles with his inevitable betrayal of Caesar, who frankly should have been better prepared, given that (with all the graffiti) the writing was literally on the wall.
Danielle Proud
Derren Brown: The Heist 9pm, C4 Brown seems quite engaging (and great value for money) in the wake of Space Cadets. The scenario is also several notches above his customarily Barnum-ish fare, and reveals an agreeably dark sense of mischief. "Under the guise of a motivational seminar" he attempts to persuade a bunch of middle managers "to steal £100,000 in what they believe is a genuine armed robbery". Bravo, maestro.
Joss Hutton
Roads To Koktebel (Boris Khlebnikov, Aleksei Popogrebsky, 2003) 8pm, Sky Cinema 1 A Russian father-and-son road movie that had the misfortune of being released soon after the flashier, more thrilling Russian father-and-son road movie The Return. The two are similar on paper but this is a quieter, less cryptic affair, with some beautiful rural scenery. The duo in question are odd-jobbing their way to the Crimean town of the title, but the son gradually starts to realise that their dream destination isn't getting any nearer, and dad's back on the booze. What else to do but take matters into his own hands?
Steve Rose
Being Julia (Istvan Szabo, 2004) 8pm, Sky Movies 1 Annette Bening is 1930s London stage actress Julia Lambert in this excellent adaptation of W Somerset Maugham's novel, Theatre. Julia's bored with husband Jeremy Irons and takes up with a young American. When he then ditches her for a younger woman, she exacts a delicious revenge on his preppy ass. Bening earns her Oscar nod and then some as she more than matches the top-hole Brit cast. The 1930s glamour is utterly seductive and makes you yearn for Maugham's London. Pre-second world war, dripping with glamour and swathed in cheroot smoke. Jolly good show, pip-pip, what.
Julia Raeside
Vera Drake (Mike Leigh, 2004) 10pm, FilmFour The repression of England in the 1950s is really the subject of Mike Leigh's realist thriller, in which Imelda Staunton puts in a remarkable performance as a kindly, respectable cleaning lady who performs abortions in secret. Refusing to accept money for the service, Vera Drake helps girls that are "in trouble" or married women who cannot cope with another child to look after. It is only when the authorities begin to investigate Drake's actions, and the seedy black market business surrounding them, that she realises how serious it all is. But it is the backdrop of a world where things are left unsaid that gives the film its power.
Will Hodgkinson
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There you go. Vera Drake. Just in case you'd made a New Year's Resolution to offer backstreet abortions to needy young women of your neighbourhood. This should make you think twice. Television. It's here to help, people.
