PICK OF THE DAY

Butterfly

9PM, ITV

‘Our 12-year-old child wants to be called Maxine, not Max. And we don’t know what to do.’ That’s the premise of this timely three-part drama, in which Anna Friel and Emmett J. Scanlan play separated couple Vicky and Stephen, who are forced to work together when their son, Max (Callum Ford-Booth), starts to become increasingly distressed around his gender identity. With his divided parents struggling to overcome their differences

(‘I want a happy daughter, not a dead son!’), will poor troubled Max find the courage to be the person he really is?

Doctor Who

6.55PM, BBC1

Episode two finds the Doctor and her new friends stranded on a bleak and hostile planet with a deadly past. Assuring them that ‘I’m really good in a tight spot – at least, I have been historically,’ she sets about fulfilling her promise to get them home, safe and sound. But with no sign of the Tardis, how will she do that?

Great Canal Journeys

8PM, CH4

For their second adventure of the ninth series, Timothy West and Prunella Scales negotiate the largest lake in Italy, Lake Maggiore, stopping off at the gorgeous Swiss lakeside town of Locarno on the northern shore. From there, they travel along Naviglio Grande, Europe’s oldest working canal, to the historic heart of Milan.

Viking Burial Secrets Revealed

9PM, CH5

In 2012, while carrying out a routine archaeological survey in a Danish town called Fregerslev, a team led by Merethe Schifter Bagge unearthed one of the largest burial sites ever found in Denmark. Their discovery shed new light on our understanding of Viking history, as this documentary reveals. SH