Pick of the day: Amanda Owen’s Farming Lives
9pm, More4
Following their separation last year, Amanda and Clive Owen, stars of Channel 5’s hit agri-documentary Our Yorkshire Farm, have embarked on solo projects. So, while Clive and their teenage son, Reuben, front Beyond The Yorkshire Farm, Amanda is temporarily leaving Ravenseat to embark on a series of three-day visits to some “extraordinary farms”. Her first stopover is on the Shetland Isles, where two young sisters farm 1,500 acres with more than 600 sheep and various rare-breed cattle and pigs. For those less interested in farm stock, the programme is wonderfully relaxing, with lovely vistas and a soundtrack of strumming guitars.
Phone Scams: Don’t Get Caught Out
8pm, Channel 5
The number of phone scams relieving Britons of tens of millions of pounds each year is bewildering. So-called dating scams alone apparently led to losses of £100m in 2021, so this report from Alexis Conran should make vital viewing as he exposes the scams – from faux internet romances and rogue online shops to fake delivery texts – and shares his top tips on avoiding them.
Landscape Artist of the Year 2023
8pm, Sky Arts
A primary school teacher from Cork and a pastry chef from Galway are among the eight hopefuls setting up easels outside Castle Ward in Northern Ireland, a stately home with one Gothic and one Palladian façade. It’s a murky morning with grey light and no shadows, but that’s no problem for the contender whose style is described by judge Kate Bryan as “Hieronymus Bosch meets sci-film meets I know not what”.
More from Culture
Surgeons: At the Edge of Life
9pm, BBC Two
The idea of being conscious while a surgeon pokes around inside your head might seem horrific, but such is the case with a 63-year-old retired nurse undergoing brain surgery at Addenbrooke’s Hospital – a high-risk procedure that requires the patient to be awake for at least part of the time. It’s all about the grey matter this week and another team operates on a 66-year-old man whose aneurysm has become diseased and could burst at any moment, with fatal consequences.
Next Level Chef
9pm, ITV1
Taking stress to the next level, perhaps, although the dishes produced in this contest have yet to prove significantly more appetising than those created in, say, MasterChef: The Professionals. This week, the 10 remaining contestants are challenged to create the perfect burger and chips, with Gordon Ramsay and his two fellow mentors, Paul Ainsworth and Nyesha Arrington, putting on a masterclass.
The Traitors US
10.40pm, BBC One
Already available to stream on BBC iPlayer for the past fortnight, so presumably fans of the original British version will have already binged on it, the American version of the hit reality show is now broadcast in double-episode chunks. Alan Cumming lays his Scottishness on with a trowel as host, while the 20 contestants are a mix of ordinary folk and veterans of various US reality TV shows (Big Brother, Real Housewives Of Beverley Hills and others you probably didn’t know existed). It all takes place at the same Scottish castle as before, while the quote of the opening episode has to be: “Sherlock Holmes was my great-great-grandfather’s cousin.”
