Satellite choice
FOOTBALL Premier League, from 11.30am, Amazon Prime
ALL nine of today’s fixtures are live on Amazon Prime. Spurs, under new manager Jose Mourinho, get things under way when they welcome Brighton to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
TIME-TRAVELLER Classic Doctor Who, Britbox
ALL 627 surviving episodes from the original 1963 to 1989 run — so, from William Hartnell to Sylvester McCoy — arrive on UK terrestrial TV’s answer to Netflix.
FASCINATING MATHS Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, 8pm, BBC4
THIS year’s new trio of daily talks is devoted to the secrets of maths. In what feels like the liveliest opening lecture in years, Dr Hannah Fry (pictured) looks at the mathematical truth behind luck, analyses ‘gut instinct’, and reveals how you can win the prize in a Christmas cracker every time.
COMIC-BOOK HEROES Avengers: Endgame, 8pm, Sky Premiere
WITH so many heroes either turned to dust or in grave danger, fans flocked to see this epic that brings together all the carefully laid threads of the previous 21 Marvel movies.
BEHIND THE MASKS Superheroes Decoded, 9pm, Blaze
THIS idea-packed, new-toFreeview two-parter reveals the inspirations that fuelled superheroes, from the wholesome U.S. heartland (Superman) to street violence (Batman) and World War II (Captain America and Wonder Woman). (Freeview 63, Freesat 162, Sky 164, Virgin 216)
SITCOM LAUGHS The Cockfields, 9pm, Gold
IF YOU missed this wellobserved comedy earlier in the year, it’s worth seeing. Bobby Ball and Sue Johnston play the couple welcoming son Simon (Joe Wilkinson, pictured right with Diane Morgan, Johnston, Ben Rufus Green and Ball) to their Isle of Wight home for his 40th birthday. What they think of as welcoming, though, feels like something else to him.
LEADING MAN I Am Patrick Swayze, 9pm, Sky Arts
MANY famous faces line up to wax lyrical about Swayze, whose skills went way beyond smouldering into the camera. He liked acting because ‘you could never be the best, never reach the end of that challenge’, but he was also a skilled ballet dancer, figure skater and licensed pilot — and he bred horses.
U.S. CRIME FIGHTERS FBI, 9pm, Sky Witness
THE season finale of this ambitious and serious-minded drama from Law & Order’s Dick Wolf; just like Wolf’s long-running police show, FBI takes great pains to present its crime-fighters in a positive light. Here, Agent Bell (Missy Peregrym) finally learns why her reporter husband was killed. There will be a season two.
KILLER THRILLER You, Netflix
THE beauty of the obsessive killer at the centre of Netflix’s psychological thriller is that he thinks he’s the hero. In season two, and now called Will, he moves from New York to LA, a city he hates because everyone’s deluded — an irony he entirely misses — and finds a new woman to obsess over.