Lost Horizons: The Big Bang/The Big Bang Machine

BBC Four, 8pm/9pm

Physics deals in superlatives and The Lost Horizons: The Big Bang is no exception, drawing on 40 years of archive footage to ask one of the biggest questions: how did the Universe begin? In The Big Bang Machine, Dr Brian Cox visits the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) where scientists are attempting to re-create the Big Bang.

Peter Ackroyd’s Thames

Sky Arts, 8.30pm

London’s biographer presents a history of our greatest waterway in this series based on his book, Thames: Sacred River. In this opening episode he travels to the river’s disputed sources in Oxfordshire and meets archaeologists digging for treasure in its banks and a couple who live on a private island in the river. Not quite the Maldives, but still.

Money for Nothing

BBC Three, 9pm

Three young people in four are in the red and the UK accrues £1 million of debt every five minutes. In this Mischief documentary Rebecca Wilcox investigate the tactics used by credit companies, and become a bank’s worst nightmare as she discovers the real cost of living off plastic.

Rich Hall’s Fishing Show

Dave, 10.40pm

In 2003 the dissident American comic Rich Hall and sidekick Mike Wilmot turned cultural commentators as they visited Scotland. Out on a loch, they started discussing travel, a subject that soon had Hall steamed up — but it was their obnoxious guest John McCririck who finally got them reaching for the gun.

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