Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Samantha Morton and Tim Roth in Rillington Place.
Samantha Morton and Tim Roth in Rillington Place. Photograph: BBC/Des Willie
Samantha Morton and Tim Roth in Rillington Place. Photograph: BBC/Des Willie

Tuesday’s best TV: Rillington Place; Life on the Psych Ward

This article is more than 7 years old

Tim Roth delivers a masterclass in macabre as infamous serial killer Reg Christie, plus a compassionate look at people with mental disorders contemplating how they can rejoin society

MasterChef: The Professionals
8pm, BBC2

It’s the final week of heats. Time for another group of hopefuls to step up to the skills test hob, and to allow those of us watching the cruel satisfaction of realising that even trained chefs haven’t got the foggiest what to do when confronted with an artichoke. Later, in the signature-dish round, there’s a valuable insight into how to succeed at MasterChef: “smiling and breathing” is better than panicking. Continues tomorrow and Thursday. Jonathan Wright

Rillington Place
9pm, BBC1

A biography-drama about 1940s serial killer Reg (AKA John) Christie begins as a grim two-hander, looking at his gaslighting and intimidation of his wife Ethel, who deduces he is a deviant but can’t find the courage to report or abandon him. Tim Roth is superb as the calmly brazen manipulator, with Samantha Morton also strong in a difficult role: the stark direction and script leave Ethel’s underlying psychology – which prevents her from saving herself – indistinct. Jack Seale

Life on the Psych Ward
9pm, Channel 4

London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital provides psychiatric care to patients considered too mentally disordered for prison. This one-off documentary follows James, John and Tony, three patients facing the prospect of discharge, each having served time for violent crime. As a life beyond lock and key looms, each man must come to terms with the trauma they’ve inflicted in the past as they contemplate re-entering society. Mark Gibbings-Jones

Storyville: The Cult That Stole Children
9pm, BBC4

Led by yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Byrne, The Family exploited the hunger for spiritual growth among well-to-do Australians in the 1960s. Socially insulated (these were “people you lived next door to”), the sect populated its camp with children from dubious adoption schemes. Suspicions mounted and the cult was raided in 1987. Home movies and survivor testimony lend a scary intensity to this vivid investigation. John Robinson

Westworld
9pm, Sky Atlantic

With the season one finale looming next week, Westworld is either charging into the home straight or rapidly running out of track, depending on how opaque you like your conspiracy thrillers. With bionic madam Maeve channelling her droid rage and killer cowpoke Teddy swapping his six-shooter for self-enlightenment, there is at least some sense of forces and factions being marshalled in both the park’s sun-baked prairies and chilly backstage corridors. Graeme Virtue

The Boy Who Can’t Stay Awake
10pm, Channel 5

A look at medical conditions that leave doctors baffled, including 14-year-old Carew who, as the title suggests, falls into a deep sleep for days on end. With doctors stumped, his worried mum takes him to Paris to try to get answers from a consultant. There’s also Seanin, who’s only 23, but has been left so weak by seizures she has to walk with a walking frame; and Natasha, whose allergic reactions leave her struggling to breathe. Hannah Verdier

F*ck That’s Delicious
10pm, Viceland

Rapper and former chef Action Bronson is the host of Viceland’s millennial-friendly food show, casting aside the formulaic food-tour vernacular for a more casual, but still well-informed, conversation about food. This week Bronson is in his home town of Queens, New York, grabbing nosh with his buds at a handful of the borough’s family-run immigrant eateries. Rick Stein this ain’t, and thank goodness for that. Grace Rahman

Films

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) 11.20pm, Film4

This classic Hitchcock thriller has James Stewart’s acrophobic ex-cop racked by guilt over the death of a woman (Kim Novak) he’s been shadowing, and remodelling a new love (Novak again) in her image, which leads to sweaty-palmed suspense high up in the church tower. In its depiction of a man recreating the glacial blonde of his fantasies, it’s seen as the voyeuristic Hitchcock’s most self-referential film.

Shell (Scott Graham, 2012) 1.55am, Film4

In the remote Scottish Highlands, teenager Shell (Chloe Pirrie) helps run a petrol station with her troubled father (Joseph Mawle), her mother having long gone. Scott Graham’s debut feature is a dour tale of loneliness and quiet desperation, but Pirrie is a luminous presence, and it is hauntingly shot by Yoliswa Gärtig.

Live sport

Snooker: UK Championship 1pm, BBC2 The third round from the Barbican Centre in York.

League Cup Football: Liverpool v Leeds United 7.30pm, Sky Sports 1 Garry Monk’s improving Championshp side visit the high-flying Reds in this quarter final.

International Netball: England v Jamaica 7.30pm, Sky Sports 3 The first of three games, from the Copper Box Arena in London.

Most viewed

Most viewed