Music Shanghaied (12.05 R3). Musical life in Shanghai – part of Radio 3’s China season. ?
Adventures in Poetry (4.30 R4). Peggy Reynolds (QMW) continues her interestingly-researched series with Sylvia Plath’s Morning Song , featuring reactions from poets, mothers, midwives and a Plath biographer.
Battle for the Titanic (4.55 C4). Who owns the rights to the fated wreck? (Repeat)
Wild: Jewel Wings (5.15 BBC2). Dragonflies.
The Sunday Feature: The Romantic Road (5.45 R3). Julian Evans in Portugal, with José Saramago and other literary figures.
Thatcher - The Downing Street Years (6.45 BBC2). A re-edited 45-minute version of the four-parter first shown in 1993 (now presumably marking the tenth anniversary of the PM’s downfall).
Changing Stages (7.30 BBC2). Part three of Richard Eyre’s series concentrates on the US - not just serious dramatists (O’Neill, Odets, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller) plus stage musicals from Kern to Bernstein.
Sunday Play: Requiem (7.30 R3). A Bryony Lavery play about the French composer Lili Boulanger. ?
The Difference (8.00 C4). A new series tackling the tricky subject of human genetic variations in a fairly informative way. Population geneticists Spencer Wells (Oxford), Ken Kidd (Yale), Luca Cavalli-Sforza, biological anthropologist Robert Foley (Cambridge) and others stress the importance of chance mutations and environmental adaptation, while the Natural History Museum’s Chris Stringer (also to be seen later the same night in Humans: Who Are We? - see below) says that "we are all Africans under the sun". There’s a studio debate after the series’ final episode: email juniper@junipertv.co.uk if you’d like to be in the audience and add some academic authority.
Behold the Man (8.00 R2). The historical Jesus? A new 'life-of-Christ' series reflecting current historical and theological thinking. Derek Jacobi narrates; among the contributors to the first programme are Danny Schwartz (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), Donald Senior (Catholic Theological Union, Chicago), Richard Bauckham (St Andrew’s) and Graham Stanton (Cambridge).
Superhuman (9.10 BBC1). Robert Winston concludes his series with "The Baby Makers", about new techniques such as pre-implantation gestation diagnosis (PGD), as practised in his own Hammersmith Hospital unit.
Humans: Who Are We? (10.00 National Geographic). A Canadian-made two-parter on human origins covering much the same ground as BBC2’s ape-man earlier this year - from bipedalism and australopithecines and Neanderthals and the rise of homo sapiens - and featuring some of the same experts such as Steve Mithen of Reading University. Most of the experts, though, are from the US - anthropologist Ralph Holloway (Columbia), Rick Potts (Smithsonian) and Ian Tattersall (American Museum of Natural History), for example. (Part two is on the following Sunday). ? (10.15 BBC1) ponders the weather: how much worse (or different) will it get? ?
The South Bank Show (10.45 ITV). Jazzer Courtney Pine profiled.
Via Dolorosa (10.55 BBC2). David Hare’s one-man performance of his own report of a visit to Israel; filmed at New York’s Lincoln Center and strangely compelling, despite Hare’s minimal acting skills.
Ultimate Questions (11.45 ITV). The last question in the series asks whether old moral assumptions have now collapsed. Debating audience questions are Brian Sewell, Germaine Greer, Canon Paul Oestreicher and Nicky Gumbel.