It’s a different set of Blue Lights for Casualty star
DRAMA Blue Lights
The first run of the Belfastset crime drama about probationary police officers went down so well with viewers when it aired last year that the BBC immediately commissioned two further series. The first is here at last and sees Sian Brooke, Katherine Devlin and Nathan Braniff reprise their roles as Grace Ellis, Annie Condon and Tommy Foster respectively. A year on, they’re more experienced, but still feeling the aftershocks of their involvement in the Mcintyre family’s downfall. Look out, too, for a very familiar face who is joining the cast – ex-casualty stalwart Derek Thompson appears as a retired cop whose dubious past may catch up with him after a rookie solicitor investigates one of his old cases.
Monday, BBC1, 9pm
TRAVEL
Martin Clunes: Islands of the Pacific
The actor’s latest travelogue sees him off on another island-hopping adventure following his escapades in America and Australia. It’s the second part of a series that was called to a halt due to the pandemic. All three episodes have been inspired by one of Clunes’s favourite childhood books, an account of the Kontiki expedition in which Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl and his team set out to travel across the Pacific on a raft. Clunes’s journey is rather more comfortable than that and begins in Papua New Guinea, whose nearest neighbour is Australia. Among the highlights is a trip to one of its most isolated areas, the Trobriand Islands, where he receives a warm welcome – the locals even build him his own house.
Monday, STV, 9pm
DRAMA Midsomer Murders
The cosy crime series is back for a 25th series, and the writers still haven’t run out of unusual ideas for whodunits. This one harks back to Cold War paranoia, as it focuses on Blacktrees-on-marsh, a sleepy Midsomer village that supposedly once turned up on a list of Russian targets in the event of a nuclear war. While some locals dismissed the claims as a myth or a joke, others take it so seriously they’ve formed their own doomsday prepper group – including Warren Kaine (Aran Bell). When he gets a phone call informing him that the missiles have been launched, he heads straight to his bunker. By the time his wife goes to tell him it’s all a hoax, he’s dead. Pathologist Fleur explains to Barnaby and Winter that someone tampered with the bunker’s oxygen supply, causing Warren to suffocate, but why did someone want him dead?
Tomorrow, STV, 8pm
COMEDY Mammoth
Mike Bubbins heads the cast of this new sitcom, which has shades of Life on Mars (and maybe the first Austin Powers film). He plays PE teacher Tony Mammoth, who in 1979 was living the bachelor lifestyle, until he was caught up in an avalanche on a school ski trip. It was assumed he’d died, but then in 2024, Mammoth is miraculously found frozen and brought back to life as a perfectly preserved middleaged man (probably best not to ask too many questions about that bit). He’s expecting that his old life will still be waiting for him – same job, car, friends, but it turns out that while he may not have changed much since 1979, the rest of the world has. And then there’s Mel (Car Share’s Sian Gibson), the mother of one of his pupils, who takes an instant dislike to him, only to discover that they have more in common than she first thought...