Monty springs into action
IT’S getting around to that time of year when you flick on the heating and sink into the sofa for a weekend of Netflix and football. Not so fast! Monty Don’s got plenty for you to be getting on with outdoors in GARDENERS’ WORLD ( BBC2, 8pm).
He’s already dreaming of a Spring 2021 that’s filled with a host of daffodils dancing in the breeze, so he’s planting them now and so should you. Other items on tonight’s smorgasbord of horticulture is a visit by Toby Buckland to a fabulous country estate in Somerset called The Newt, whose gardens are among the most exciting around, with a revived cyder apple orchard, a Fragrance Garden and apple tree maze.
Whether you don your gardening gloves tomorrow or not, this show offers an hour of greenery- gazing that’ll soothe away the cares of the week.
Follow the cycle of life for animals from gannets to killer whales in ATLANTIC: A YEAR IN THE WILD ( C5, 9pm). Tonight we see the ocean burst back to life after a long winter, but the warm season is short and its inhabitants scrabble to find secure places to mate, have babies and bring them up in that brief window.
Gannets flock back to Britain and Ireland from the warm south but fight over cliffside nesting spots, while Iceland’s seabirds worry about the approach of hungry foxes and their cubs, who are willing to risk life and limb on the Atlantic’s precarious cliffs to prey on them. In the most exciting segment, killer whales head from Iceland to Shetland, where they work as a team to hunt seal pups, who really don’t stand a chance.
Dating show concepts get ever crazier, from the pants- free style of Naked Attraction to the sexy musical chairs of Love Island. FIVE GUYS A WEEK ( C4, 10pm) seems a little low- fi by comparison but is surprisingly compelling, mostly because five guys competing for the affection of one woman brings out some hilarious, strange and occasionally gross mating displays.
The second series kicks off with 32- year- old singleton Tara from Halifax, who’s bummed that all her friends are getting married and her closest relationship of late has been with her dog. So she invites five potential suitors into her home for a week to size them up and then evict one each morning at breakfast. Among them is muscly Michael, an oven cleaner, and Lou, a haulage guy who looks like Peter Kay.
Their chat- up lines, bathroom habits, banter and behaviour all come under scrutiny. They’ll face interrogations by parents and friends of Tara, and occasionally they’ll undermine each other’s efforts, which may be ungentlemanly but not unexpected in the cutthroat world of dating. Now coronavirus has put hook- ups out of bounds for the foreseeable, this is a vicarious pleasure.