Avatar: The Way of Water lands at Disney+, Faraway Fields looks at an Irish farmer, forester and fisherman in challenging conditions, Extraordinary Escapes With Sandi Toksvig returns with a visit to Clare, while Suranne Jones stars in Maryland . . .
Pick of the Day
Avatar: The Way of Water, Disney+
This is the kind of thing that convinces me that Disney will be the ultimate winner in the streaming wars. It's impossible to keep competing with the likes of this, Star Wars and Marvel combined.
Just in case you've been off on a holiday to Saturn for the last few years, Avatar: The Way of Water is a 2022 animated sequel directed and produced by James Cameron.
It's the CGI-tastic sequel to the massively successful Avatar (2009) and stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Giovanni Ribisi, Dileep Rao, and Matt Gerald, along with Sigourney Weaver and Kate Winslet.
It follows a blue-skinned humanoid Na'vi named Jake Sully (Worthington) as he and his family, under renewed human threat, seek refuge with the aquatic Metkayina clan of Pandora, a habitable exomoon on which they live.
Don't Miss
The Repair Shop, 8.00pm, BBC One
This show remains a feelgood treat.
This week the team welcome the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage into the Repair Shop who brings with him a harmonium, the subject of one of his poems that brings back memories of his late father.
Cobbler Dean Westmoreland is given the task of repairing Valerie's pair of children's leather clogs that were bought to help her sister with mobility issues balance in the 1950s.
Kirsten Ramsay is tasked with reviving Martin's broken sculpture depicting his mother as a young woman made by a Czechoslovakian art student in 1947.
Finally, Kirsty visits jeweller Richard Talman, hoping he can fix her mum's silver charm bracelet gifted to her mother by her father in the early 1960s.
The Gallows Pole, 9.00pm, BBC Two
Shane Meadows' period drama continues as David gathers his family and friends and explains he has brought some tools from Birmingham giving them the potential to transform everyone's lives.
He then gives them a demonstration in the art of coin clipping, a method of forgery which uses slivers taken from one several real coins to make a counterfeit version.
All they need now is to round up enough money to get them started.
Dispatches: Britain's Forgotten Pensioners, 10.00pm, Channel 4
It's often been said that a society should be judged on how it treats its young, sick and old members of the population.
Here's how the latter are faring in Brexit Britain, where one of the country's richest men is Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Dispatches follows four pensioners through winter as they struggle to make ends meet with the exceedingly high price of energy and soaring inflation.
John, 76, lives alone in Sunderland in the home he used to share with his parents and siblings and spends his nights sat in darkness, afraid his energy bills are too high to turn the lights on.
Sixty eight-year-old Doreen has had only two visitors in the 38 years she has lived in her home and goes to bed early to stay warm.
In rural Leicestershire, 82-year-old Harry and his wife 77-year-old Christine skip dinner as a desperate attempt at cutting costs.
Kisses at Fifty, 10.00pm, BBC Four
Here's a slice of classic TV from the BBC's legendary Play for Today series.
Bill Maynard stars in Colin Welland's 1973 play about adultery - and plays a married factory worker who kisses a barmaid (Marjorie Yeats, above, with Maynard) in front of the whole pub on his 50th birthday - and the consequences for all around him.
Directed by Michael Apted and co-starring Rosemarie Dunham, Marjorie Yates and Lori Wells.
New or Returning Shows
Faraway Fields, 9.35pm, RTÉ One
Streaming on RTÉ Player
An Irish farmer, forester and fisherman try their jobs in some of the most challenging conditions on Earth.
To begin with, Cork fisherman Johnny Walsh joins his counterparts off the west coast of Africa, working in a wooden boat in the over-exploited Gambian waters.
Here he navigates the precarious food supply of coastal communities, where dwindling fish stocks force them to take perilous sea journeys.
Extraordinary Escapes With Sandi Toksvig, 9.00pm, Channel 4
As the series returns, Sandi is joined by Eddie Izzard on an Irish adventure as they visit three holiday hideaways in counties Clare, Kerry and Cork and bond over homemade apple crumble.
Their first stop in County Clare is a miniature modern marvel called Teeroneer, a timber-clad, prize-winning property with a sunken kitchen that Sandi just can't resist taking a turn at cooking.
From there the pair head to Ark Ranch Treehouse. Hand-built by one woman, Sandi and Eddie are charmed by the sense of childhood adventure they feel.
Finally, they head to Lost Cottage in the mountains and lakes of County Kerry. A classic fusion of old and new, the remote rental gives the pair an excuse for Sandi and Eddie to head off on fishing trip.
Dúirt Bean Liom, 8.30pm, TG4
This new series looks at thirteen women from different generations, with extensive life experience, to get their perspectives on major personal issues from a woman’s point of view.
Across the series, the women share their opinions and experiences of dealing with life challenges, love and relationships, women’s role in life and how that is changing and issues concerning women and their bodies.
In the first programme, Grian Ní Dháimhín gives an insight into the inequality around her growing up in Strabane from a very young age.
We get an account of how Nadia Dobrianska's life has changed having moved here from Ukraine because of the outbreak of war in her country.
Nadia works with human rights and was under threat. We meet Maura Harrington, a lifelong activist having come to national attention with her Shell to Sea campaign, a woman who is fighting for her environment and trying to fight climate change.
Maryland, 9.00pm, Virgin Media More
In this three-part miniseries, down-to-earth mother of two Becca (Suranne Jones) and disciplined high-flyer Rosaline (Eve Best) have been driven apart by complex family dynamics.
But when the body of their mother is discovered at sunrise on Laxey Beach in the Isle of Man, it brings devastating news for the sisters.
In episode one, Becca and Rosaline travel to the Isle of Man to repatriate the body of their mother, Mary, leaving their father Richard (George Costigan) at home in Manchester.
The sisters have taken separate roads in life and found themselves further away from each other than ever before.
Confined on the island, they discover shocking information about their mother and find it impossible to escape the ripple effect of her secrets and lies.
New to Stream
Living, Prime Video
Bill Nighy is great in this 2022 drama, adapted from the 1952 Japanese classic film Ikiru directed by Akira Kurosawa, which in turn was inspired by the 1886 Russian novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy.
Set in 1953 London, it focuses on Rodney Williams, a civil servant in the county Public Works department (played by Bill Nighy) facing a potentially fatal illness.
When Williams receives a terminal cancer diagnosis he neglects to tell his son and daughter-in-law. He then withdraws half of his life savings, purchases a lethal amount of sleeping medicine, and aims to commit suicide in a seaside resort town.
After failing to go through with it, Williams sees a positive - a reason for living - and seeks to force the city authorities to build the children's playground local mothers have been desperately petitioning for and which he and his colleagues had been preventing.
