What’s on TV this weekend: Doctor Who and Race Across the World skits raise money for Children in Need 2023

Friday

Pick of the day: Children in Need 2023

7pm, BBC One

Ade Adepitan, Mel Giedroyc, Chris Ramsey, Jason Manford, Alex Scott and the Bafta-winning young actor Lenny Rush (Am I Being Unreasonable?) front this year’s appeal night live from Media City UK. Among the highlights is a special one-off Doctor Who scene starring David Tennant, a MasterChef skit in which John Torode and Gregg Wallace are joined by puppets, and a parody of Race Across The World called Race Across Yorkshire. The cast of the new musical I Should Be So Lucky perform a medley of Stock, Aitken and Waterman hits, and there’s more music courtesy of Jerub, Leigh-Anne, and the UK’s Junior Eurovision act Stand Uniqu3.

Live England International Football

7pm, Channel 4

England vs Malta (kick-off 7.45pm). Jules Breach presents coverage of the Group C Uefa Euro 2024 qualifier at Wembley Stadium. There’s not much at stake here as England secured their place in next year’s finals with two matches to spare after beating Italy. Gareth Southgate should opt to experiment against a team that has lost all seven of their matches in the group.

Beechgrove Garden in Winter

7.30pm, BBC Two

Carole Baxter looks at how to deal with bare spots in a plot with ideas on evergreen ground cover, and George Anderson demonstrates how to prune gooseberries and redcurrants. Meanwhile, Kirsty Wilson plants up a conifer container, and there’s a visit to father and daughter gardeners Erin and Joe Armstrong to find out what’s on their to-do list this month.

Big Brother: Live Final

9pm, ITV1

Those who shook their heads in disbelief when it was announced that ITV was disinterring the addled ancestor of British reality TV have been proved largely wrong, although the channel was probably wise to mostly relegate the familiar but refreshed-feeling show to ITV2. Anyway, tonight it’s back on ITV1 as we discover which housemate pockets the £100,000 prize. Will Best and AJ Odudu then interview the finalists and look back on some of the highlights of the past 40 days and nights.

Country Music Awards 2023

10.35pm, BBC Four

Highlights of the 57th annual Country Music Association Awards, from Nashville, Tennessee, where artists due to perform included Jelly Roll, K Michelle, Little Big Town, Megan Moroney, Old Dominion, Carly Pearce, Chris Stapleton, Tanya Tucker and Lainey Wilson. The coverage is bookended by two programmes about Linda Ronstadt: a documentary about the hugely versatile singer, who had to retire in 2011 after developing Parkinson’s disease, and a special performance by Ronstadt on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1976.

Breeders

11pm, Sky Showcase

“This is crazy cleaning… it’s like a documentary,” observes Ava (Zoë Athena) as mum Ally (Daisy Haggard) goes on a scrubbing and dusting frenzy, not to mention staying up all night baking muffins. The reason for this uncharacteristic domesticity is a reunion with her baby group friends, women she has not kept in contact with for the past 17 years. But the reunion proves disappointing on several fronts, not least because, instead of the wine guzzling get-together Ally had envisaged, her guests are all desiring cups of tea.

Saturday

Pick of the day: David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived

9pm, Sky Documentaries

“I have more broomstick miles than any other person on the planet,” says David Holmes, who, for 10 years, was Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double on the Harry Potter films. That all came to a juddering, tragic halt in 2009, as Holmes suffered a life-changing spinal injury on the set of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This HBO documentary follows Radcliffe as he meets up with the wheelchair-using Holmes and provides an insight into the rigorous requirements of the stunt industry.

Strictly Come Dancing: Blackpool Special

6.40pm, BBC One

As everyone will surely be aware by now, it is Strictly’s annual mid-point staging post, when the remaining contestants leave Elstree Studio for Blackpool Tower. Krishnan Guru-Murthy and dance partner Lauren Oakley won’t, of course, be making the trip after their dismissal last weekend.

The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence

8pm, Channel 4

Rob Rinder and Philippa Langley reinvestigate new leads in the case of the infamous historical mystery, concerning the fate of the two young princes who disappeared in 1483. This led to claims that Richard III had them killed to validate his own claim to the throne, but new evidence drawn from across Europe presents other theories as to their fate.

When Blondie Came to Britain

9pm, BBC Two

A documentary on the symbiotic relationship between Britain and New York pop-punks Blondie. “It’s like coming home really,” says Debbie Harry of the UK in a new set of interviews with the band that link archive footage – from their first gig at the Student’s Union in Bournemouth in 1977 (recalling the “quaint English custom” of being gobbed on by the pogoing audience) to their 2023 Glastonbury set. Jools Holland and Johnny Marr also contribute, calling them “our sort of people”.

Scrublands

9pm, BBC Four

BBC Four’s Saturday night crime-drama slot used to be the home of Scandi noir and other subtitled imports, although increasingly it has been raiding the Australian TV market for shows. This flavoursome new Aussie six-parter follows a disenchanted investigative reporter, Martin Scarsden (Luke Arnold) as he is dispatched to write a follow-up article about how the citizens of a small Outback town are coping one year after the mass shooting of five parishioners by a charismatic young priest. The locals aren’t welcoming – although needless to say, they are hiding something.

Kin

9.35pm, BBC One

A stellar Irish cast leads this noirish new Dublin-set gangster thriller, Aidan Gillen playing the patriarch of the drug-dealing Kinsella family. After one of their own is killed, the Kinsellas embark on a gangland war with their rival Eamon Cunningham (Ciarán Hinds) – a war they seemingly can’t win, as the Kinsellas are a local family while Cunningham’s cartel is part of a vast global organisation. The supporting cast includes Charlie Cox and Emmett J Scanlan.

Sunday

Pick of the day: Boat Story

9pm, BBC One

There is nothing new about a thriller in which two hard-up strangers stumble on a fortune in illegal drugs and have to flee from its rightful (as it were) owners. But writers Harry and Jack Williams (The Missing, Baptiste) bring a fresh spin to the material, with a Desperate Housewives-style narrator, while the almost cartoonishly gruesome violence brings to mind Killing Eve. Paterson Joseph and Daisy Haggard play the strangers walking their dogs one morning when they stumble on a washed-up boat loaded with cocaine. Tchéky Karyo is the vicious gangster on their heels.

Planet Earth III

6.20pm, BBC One

A dead bat may not be the sort of gift to win a girl’s heart, but for the female pied hornbills of the Borneo rainforest it is a sign that a prospective mate can provide for her. Forests are the subject of this week’s slice of David Attenborough-presented wildlife, including a boggling sequence in which an Amazon treehopper protects its eggs by calling on the assistance of some local bees, which are then paid in nectar.

The Masked Singer: I’m a Celebrity Special

7.30pm, ITV1

Joel Dommett hosts as four former I’m A Celebrity… contestants compete undercover in elaborate costumes, with Rita Ora, Jonathan Ross, Davina McCall and Mo Gilligan trying to guess the identities of Dunny, Huntsman, Bearded Dragon and Wombat.

I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!

9pm, ITV1

So now we know the identities of the contestants joining Ant and Dec in the Queensland rainforest. Nigel Farage has been garnering most of the pre-publicity and will no doubt relish the soapbox along with his reported £1.5m fee, joined by Britney Spears’ sister Jamie Lynn Spears, First Dates host Fred Sirieix, food critic Grace Dent, Made in Chelsea’s Sam Thompson and various other soap actors, presenters and YouTubers.

Bill Bailey’s Australian Adventure

9pm, Channel 4

The comedian heads to Western Australia’s Ningaloo Coast to experience the epic scale of the Outback, including The Pinnacles rock formations, stromatolites and the celebrated Pink Lake, as well as encountering wild emus and swimming alongside whale sharks.

JFK Assassination: What Happened in the Trauma Room

9pm, Channel 5

An intriguing documentary reuniting seven doctors who were present in the Parkland Hospital emergency room on the day President John F Kennedy was rushed there after being shot in 1963. Decades later, they divulge unsettling medical details that raise doubts about the government conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

La Voix Humaine

9.25pm, BBC Four

BBC Four is all about opera this evening, including this 2022 recording of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House’s new production of Poulenc’s short opera based on Jean Cocteau’s 1928 play, featuring soprano Danielle de Niese.