This World BBC Two, 7pm

A popular Australian beach seems an unlikely setting for a clash of Muslim and Western values, but two years ago Cronulla beach in Sydney became the scene of a series of violent and unpleasant clashes between Australian communities. Hostilities opened with the alleged harassment of young women in bikinis by Muslim youths and an attack on lifeguards. In the wake of 9/11 and the Bali bombings this provoked a fierce backlash and several nights of rioting followed. This film follows Mecca Laalaa, one of 22 Muslim Lebanese Australians training to become lifeguards in an effort to improve community relations. Mecca will wear a “burqini”, but must race to overcome a particular handicap: she can’t swim.

The Museum, BBC Two, 7.30pm

Tonight’s episode of the delightful fly-on-the-mummy series about the British Museum is dominated by shaming statistics. Shopping for Posterity examines the fraught process of keeping the world-renowned collection alive with new acquisitions as the budget allocation shrinks, from £1 million a year in the 1980s to £100,000 today. Even with grants and donations, the figure rises to only £700,000 compared with the $4 million spent by the Metropolitan Museum in New York. We follow the eager staff as they scrape up the funding to buy medals, Russian porcelain and a huge artwork installation commemorating the slave trade.

Dalziel & Pascoe, BBC One, 9pm

Warren Clarke returns as the deliciously grumpy DS Dalziel in Project Aphrodite, the first of two new two-parters. He’s supposed to have been in Australia for five weeks, so his battered old satchel of a face looks as if he has just lost an argument with the inside of a microwave. DI Pascoe (Colin Buchanan), who has been enjoying his independence, isn’t entirely overjoyed by his return. As so often, Dalziel’s northern-accented grumbling belies a complex plot. Pharmaceutical companies are always good for paranoid secrecy, commercial chicanery and all-round skulduggery, and Eternus Biotech proves no exception. When a brilliant research student and pro-animal experimentation activist is murdered, the bodies start dropping like laboratory fruit flies.

My Name Is Earl, Channel 4, 10pm

The cult American comedy about the petty criminal waster desperately trying to reform and atone for the havoc of his earlier life returns for its second series. Earl sees a chance to cross off No 183 from the list of past misdemeanours for which he seeks to make reparation by arranging a surprise party for his ex, the dippy blonde Joy. But Joy has bought an entertainment centre that is too large for her trailer and when the Bargain Bag superstore refuses to take it back, she hijacks a delivery truck. The show’s fast pace, cartoonish characters and surreal edges are already influencing new British writers, but it is just as intriguing for its peek into life among the trailer trash.

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