Documentary
Hidden Wales with Will Millard BBC FOUR, 8.00PM
The BBC is certainly getting its money’s worth from Will Millard, making him climb and crawl around those parts of Wales not shown in tourism adverts. A visit to St Govan’s cave on the Pembrokeshire coast – so concealed that it was only rediscovered 50 years ago – requires Millard to abseil down a cliff face and swing himself inside the entrance. The reward is a peek inside a cave once used by Neolithic farmers. VP
Babies: Their Wonderful World BBC TWO, 9.00PM
The clutch of adorable babies on show is reason enough to watch this compelling exploration of how infants learn social interaction. In this second episode, at her “Baby Lab”, Dr Guddi Singh oversees some illuminating experiments with puppets, showing how early babies can discern good behaviour from bad. VP
The Eugenics Crusade PBS AMERICA, 9.00PM
The horrors perpetrated by the Nazis have long since eclipsed eugenics programmes elsewhere. But this two-part documentary series, full of historians and great archive footage, reminds us how the movement to breed out so-called “bad genes” originally came about.
It was a notion propounded by Victorian polymath Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin), and it took fervent hold in America in the early 20th century through various state-sponsored programmes of forced sterilisation. VP