Unreported World

Channel 4, 7.35pm

According to the reporter Nima Elbagir, Venezuela has the highest per capita murder rate in the world, with one murder every 14 minutes. The police are unable to enforce law and order. The appalling conditions in its overcrowded prisons mean that they are bombs waiting to explode, and its healthcare system cannot cope with an epidemic of gunshot wounds. In the midst of this violence, victims and criminals alike are turning to the so-called Cult of the Thugs, a supernatural belief that invokes the spirits of dead gangsters to intercede on their behalf. You can’t get much more desperate than that.

Gavin & Stacey

BBC One, 9.30pm

Series two of the Bafta award-winning comedy gets a repeat (it was first shown on BBC Three) to take us up to the Christmas Special, which is sure to be a highlight of the festive season. The writers James Corden and Ruth Jones — who also play Gavin and Stacey’s best friends Smithy and Nessa — have created such a tight but wide-ranging cast of characters, each loveable in their own way, that it’s always a pleasure to meet them again. Nessa, in particular, is brilliant — hard as nails and with a thousand past lives, including driving for The Who and founding the girlband All Saints. One thing she hasn’t done, though, is have a baby, and her pregnancy is revealed to a shocked Smithy tonight.

The IT Crowd

Channel 4, 10pm

Now into its third season, The IT Crowd is still flying a flag for the old-fashioned sitcom. Set in the basement of a company where the nerds (Chris O’Dowd and Richard Ayoade) reboot computers under a manager who knows nothing about them, it comes replete with punchlines, farce and raucous laughter. It also tends to be wildly erratic. It can be very funny when it works, but if the farce doesn’t fly, there is not enough substance in the characters to make up the difference.

This episode — in which a line manager suspects a builder of peeing into her basin at home — is not a vintage one.

Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill

Channel 4, 10.35pm

Eddie Izzard has always been a law unto himself, a fact well demonstrated in this triumphant performance given in San Francisco nearly ten years ago.

It includes routines on the Heimlich manoeuvre, Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Da Vinci’s Last Supper, the story of how Engelbert Humperdinck got his name and — an obvious subject for humour, this — the development of prehistoric architecture. “Before there was Stonehenge,” he explains, “there was Woodhenge and Strawhenge . . . ” It is safe to say that there is no other comedian like him.

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