Whirlybird: Live Above LA – Storyville

BBC4, 9pm You’ve probably never heard of Marika Gerrard and Bob Tur, but it’s likely you’ve seen their work. As husband and wife working together in their news helicopter in the 1980s and 1990s they were the go-to TV reporting team when stories broke in Los Angeles – including the sensational highway chase of O.J. Simpson in 1994, which they caught on camera from the air.

So you might expect to find a documentary about the pair to be an action-packed account of their incredible career. But as the years go by, this revealing portrait morphs into a very different account of Tur facing up to the anger that fed his demons and eventually led him to change gender and become Zoey.

It’s an absorbing story, even if the California-style self-obsession may frequently stretch your patience.

Sky Arts, 9pm

What more is there to say about Ludwig van Beethoven? Conductor Charles Hazlewood (right) has a gleeful and almost manic genius that quickly dispels any cynical doubts viewers might have about another documentary on the great composer.

For Hazlewood, Beethoven is far from being a lofty, distant figure; instead he sees him as a flawed human wracked by psychological torment. He makes a persuasive case in this highly personal film as he traces the suffering through the notes of the incomparable Fifth Symphony, and even the violent crossings out of the original manuscript suggest his troubled thoughts.

Hazlewood isn’t shy about putting forward unprovable theories – many will take issue with his conclusions – but he invites us to listen again with an open mind to Beethoven’s great works.

Devils Sky Atlantic, 9pm

After the critically acclaimed BBC2 drama Industry, here’s another tale set inside the rarefied world of high finance.

It pits two men at the top of a large international investment bank against each other: Massimo Ruggeri (Alessandro Borghi) is beginning to question what lies behind the success that has made him so wealthy, and his doubts bring him up against his boss and patron Dominic Morgan (Patrick Dempsey, right), whose exterior cool hides many dark secrets.

The story begins with a bang that sets the stakes at life or death from the outset, and to spice up the entertainment, real-world events are mixed in with fiction throughout the story. Among a strong supporting cast featuring Ken Stott and Ben Miles, Lars Mikkelsen steals every scene playing a cyber-campaigner clearly modelled on Julian Assange.

Channel 5, 10pm

Her personality was always resolutely upbeat as the presenter of That’s Life!, but Dame Esther Rantzen (right) has had to cope with the shadow of death ever since the heart attack that killed her husband Desmond Wilcox two decades ago.

Now she takes that experience and opens up with powerful candour to talk about her feelings of grief with half a dozen other people who have suffered bereavement. Among those she meets are a woman whose husband was one of the many thousands of victims of coronavirus in the UK, as well as a man whose brother was murdered and – perhaps most heartbreakingly of all – the mother of a child who drowned.

It’s painful viewing – especially when Rantzen herself weeps – but in the end this provides a genuinely positive ray of hope for the future.