TV highlights this week: Michael McIntyre’s Big Show, Dancing on Ice, Maternal, The Apprentice

Preview by Scheenagh Harrington

For years, Ant and Dec have had an iron grip on the Saturday night family entertainment crown, with a succession of shows that have delighted the nation.

But could comedian Michael McIntyre, with his boyish good looks, ability to shriek in a voice only dogs can hear, and complete lack of vanity be the pretender to their throne? With the return of this hilarious, celebrity and fun-packed extravaganza, it’s a distinct possibility.

Last seen on our screens in December 2019, Michael McIntyre’s Big Show is coming back at a time when it feels like the entire nation needs a jolly good belly laugh, as well as an escape from the doom and gloom of the daily headlines.

Filmed in front of the audience at London’s prestigious Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, the opening episode of season six dishes out a slice of unmissable good, clean family fun.

It will see Joel Corry and Tom Grennan perform their smash hit Lionheart (Fearless) and an unsuspecting Antiques Roadshow fan get the biggest surprise of their life, while TV legend Rylan Clark bravely hands over his phone in Send to All.

Have a hankie at the ready for the big finish, with an incredibly heart-warming performance from the Unexpected Star of the Show.

Here’s hoping the wickedly funny Midnight Gameshow format is still among the line-up, but there may also be new goodies for us to lap up during the latest series.

No matter what’s in store, the connecting thread throughout the entire evening is, of course, Michael and his infectious, irrepressible energy.

Watching television with his children on a Saturday night was part of the inspiration behind The Big Show. “I liked the dynamic of the whole family watching TV together and found trying to create a show that everyone can enjoy really appealing,” he says.

It certainly seems to have struck a chord with the viewing public, with more than seven million people tuning in to watch seasons four and five. It scooped the BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance in 2017, and has been nominated for Best Entertainment Performance, Presenter and Show in the years since.

You have to wonder how the comedian fits it all in.

In the last couple of years, as well as fronting The Big Show, he’s the host of both the US and UK versions of quiz show The Wheel, which also bagged a BAFTA Entertainment Performance nomination last year. He presented the 2021 documentary Michael McIntyre: In His Own Words, the Showman stand-up comedy for Netflix, spent two years on an eponymous world tour, and is set to launch the Jet-Lagged and Jolly shows at some point this year.

Michael also holds the record for being The O2 in London’s biggest selling artist, following 28 sold-out gigs, and has taken his brand of comedy to more than 20 countries. As if all of that wasn’t exhausting enough, he’s also a dad-of-two.

We’ve recently seen him host a run of The Wheel, and now, just a few weeks later, he’s back. Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? In this case, certainly not.

Dancing On Ice (Sunday 15/01/23, ITV, 6.30pm)

Preview by Sarah Morgan

“We’re kicking off a blockbuster 2023 entertainment schedule with our biggest names and best loved formats to keep our viewers glued to their screens, as well as singing, dancing and guessing along.” So claimed Katie Rawcliffe, Head of Entertainment Commissioning at ITV, when the broadcaster launched its new season of shows on January 1.

She wasn’t kidding either. We’ve already been treated to new runs of Ant & Dec’s Limitless Win (Saturday Night Takeaway will return in the spring), The John Bishop Show and The Masked Singer, with Next Level Chef making its debut last week.

But now the feather in the cap of ITV’s entertainment crown is back for its 15th series – but who will follow in Regan Gascoigne’s fleet-footed steps as this year’s winner?

It’s far too early to tell, although the smart money may be on Olympic gymnast Nile Wilson who, if he can master the skates, should have the agility to pull off some amazing moves. He’s certainly ambitious: “This is a really cool thing. I’ve certainly not done much ice-skating but I am so excited for the opportunity. My biggest goal is to do something that no-one has ever done before!”

Drag Queen The Vivienne is also taking part, and regards the opportunity as a groundbreaking moment: “This is honestly a dream come true and I can’t wait to start training on the ice. To be the first drag artist to take part in one of the big UK reality competition shows is truly an honour. I think it’s a big step forward for queer representation on TV.”

But for Patsy Palmer, signing up was a far more personal affair. “I wanted to challenge myself and get out of my comfort zone,” revealed the ex-EastEnders star when she became the first confirmed participant. “I thought ‘I’ll just go for it’ and it seems like a lot of fun.

“My pact that I made with myself when I was 50 was I have to do things to challenge myself for the next couple of years. This is for all the 50-year-olds out there that think they can’t challenge themselves!”

The rest of the line-up features Mollie Gallagher, aka Coronation Street’s Nina, Love Island winner Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu, former footballer John Fashanu, ex-Hollyoaks actor Carley Stenson, reality TV star Joey Essex, comedian Darren Harriott, singer Michelle Heaton and The Wanted’s Siva Kaneswaran.

Joining them are professional skaters Matt Evers (who’s been with the show since it began), Alexandra Schauman, Łukasz Różycki, Mark Hanretty, Brendyn Hatfield, Vanessa Bauer, Tippy Packard and Colin Grafton. Olivia Smart is a new addition to the line-up, while Sylvain Longchambon, Vicky Ogden and Klabera Komini are returning to the fray.

As ever, Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby are the hosts, with judges Christopher Dean, Jayne Torvill, Ashley Banjo and Oti Mabuse offering their views.

The run has the potential to be the best yet – whether you’re a fan of watching great skill or simply love seeing famous folk fall over – and it should also warm up these long, cold January nights no end.

Maternal (Monday 16/01/23, ITV, 9pm)

Preview by Sarah Morgan

Does Parminder Nagra own her own set of scrubs? She probably should – after all, she’s played a member of the medical profession so many times she’s almost an honorary doctor.

After making her name in the movie Bend It Like Beckham, the Leicester-born star spent six years in global smash-hit ER before playing a psychiatrist in TV series Alcatraz. She’s also played doctors in seasons two and three of Sky’s baffling drama Fortitude, Netflix’s horror movie Bird Box, sitcom Black-ish and the romantic comedy Five Feet Apart.

Now she’s returning to the small screen to stalk the wards once more in a new six-part series about three women returning to post-pandemic frontline medicine after being on maternity leave.

The programme reunites Nagra with Bafta-nominated director James Griffiths, whose previous work includes the aforementioned Black-ish, as well as Episodes and A Million Little Things.

She’s joined in the cast by Lara Pulver, who plays single mum and skilled surgeon Ms Catherine MacDiarmid, and Lisa McGrillis, whose on-screen alter ego, Dr Helen Cavendish, is a registrar in acute medicine. Nagra, meanwhile, takes the role of Dr Maryam Afridi, a paediatrician who wonders if she can remain emotionally detached from her patients having now had a child of her own.

After watching the drama, the role seems to have been tailor-made for her, but that’s not the case.

“Lara Pulver and I are best mates and neighbours in LA,” smiles the 47-year-old star. “During the pandemic we’ve been doing a lot of our audition tapes together. So when she taped her audition to play Catherine in Maternal, I read the opposite parts – both Helen and Maryam. And during her call back, the director, James Griffiths, said, ‘Can I give Parminder a note?’ It made me laugh but also think, ‘How dare you? I’m not even up for this project!’

“The following day, I got an email asking me to audition as Maryam. I did my audition tape with Lara’s husband, Raza Jaffrey, who is also my very good friend and who had been cast to play Jack, a surgeon and a former boyfriend of Catherine. So we took our whole kit and caboodle to Liverpool for filming like a little family. To get a chance to work alongside Lara, who I love and respect, is just fantastic.”

Nagra also admits that her previous experience of playing medics proved to be both a help and a hindrance: “I did feel like medicine was a little bit still in there, even down to technically how to camouflage things for the camera. Like when you’re intubating a patient, you hold your hand in a certain way to mask the fact you’re not really doing it.

“The funniest part was that some of the terminology that I got used to saying on ER, I was told, ‘That’s not how you say it here.’ It’s pronounced differently in Britain.”

As has often been said, a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. But there’s clearly something about Nagra that makes viewers believe she really could carry out a life-saving procedure – with that in mind, you can bet those scrubs will get another airing soon.

Winterwatch (Tuesday 17/01/23, BBC Two, 8pm)

Preview by Richard Jones

January can be a tough month, but it’s not all doom and gloom, as the BBC shows with this programme – its perennial tonic for the coldest and the shortest days of the year.

Chris Packham, Michaela Strachan and co are back tonight to explain how winter can actually be the most magical of all the seasons, when the bare trees expose themselves and wildlife make the most of any opportunity as the frost takes hold.

As last year, they will be based at Wild Ken Hill conservation project in Norfolk, standing around a roaring fire in their big padded jackets and bobble hats, and introducing footage from a multitude of live cameras focusing on the marshland and farmland of the east of England.

They will be taking a look at the area’s grey seal populations latest breeding season, and Michaela will be learning what mermaid’s purses can tell us about the health of our seas. Plus, the duo will be uncovering the hidden secrets of the birds that come to our garden feeders over winter.

We’ll also be enjoying two super flocks that make Norfolk their home in colder months, as pink-footed geese and corvids put on an epic show when they go to roost. The winter rains have brought life back to the grazing marsh and the waterfowl and waders should provide a seasonal spectacle.

We’ll also be seeing how the beavers maintain their dams in the winter now the water levels have risen, and hope that their pond continues to be an exceptional raptor-fest for goshawks, sparrowhawks and buzzards.

Meanwhile, Chris and Michaela’s co-presenters Iolo Williams and Gillian Burke are in one of the UK’s greenest cities – Edinburgh – as cameras are trained on a very active wild badger sett in the heart of the Scottish capital’s zoo.

They will also follow peregrines and uncover exciting new research along the Water of Leith, Edinburgh’s very own wildlife highway – home to secretive otters and marathon migrating eels.

As well as features from its two bases, Winterwatch will also showcase pre-recorded films covering the length and breadth of the country, including tonight’s look at the largest jackdaw roost in the UK.

Plus, ex-soldier and police officer Paul Williams, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, photographs mountain hares high up in the Cairngorms, and singer-songwriter David Gray follows the curlew, a species that has enchanted since he was a little boy.

Professor Lynne Boddy explains how veteran trees can be saved by inoculating young species with a kind of fungi called heart rot, and Nadeem Perera reveals how he has found solace and serenity watching jackdaws.

Megan McCubbin is invited to join two intrepid birders to witness a starling murmuration, while John Keeling follows stoats, Dr Aleksander Domanski takes his kayak into the water at night, and TV Doctor and newly appointed president of the RSPB, Dr Amir Khan, shows us around his frosty city garden in Leeds.

This season of Winterwatch will also see the return of an audience favourite – Mindfulness Moments. In each programme, there’ll be a 90-second film of pure nature. No music, no presenter voice-over, just natural sound and glorious pictures to take us to wild places or immerse us in natures favourite species.

Hopefully, all that will be enough to ease those those January blues.

Surgeons: At the Edge of Life (Wednesday 18/01/23, BBC Two, 9pm)

Preview by Scheenagh Harrington

It would appear we’ve always had a thing for surgeons. From the days of Doctor Finlay’s Casebook to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Dr Strange, these scalpel-wielding, sculptured demi-gods always manage to make the right diagnosis, get the patient under the knife in the nick of time and still have space in their diaries for adventure, romance and other shenanigans.

They’ve captured the attention (and hearts) of audiences like no other. Unless you count the men and women behind the BBC series Your Life in Their Hands.

This startling, fly-on-the-wall documentary first aired in 1958 and ran for five series until 1964, despite the British Medical Association bemoaning the “publicisation of pathology and surgical treatments”.

It covered respiratory paralysis, poliomyelitis, cancer and radiotherapy, liver cirrhosis, head injury, thyroid diseases, chronic bronchitis and pneumoconiosis – words many viewers had never even heard of before.

More than eight million people tuned in as presenter Dr Charles Fletcher examined surgical practice from the point of view of both the experts and patients from various hospitals around the country.

A colour version, fronted by the legendary Jonathan Miller, was broadcast in the early years of the 1970s, before the show was given a new lease of life again in 1979.

This time, Professor Robert Winston was our host as cameras stood cheek-by-jowl with surgical staff in operating theatres, revealing the secrets of complex medical procedures.

Many families were divided between those who were glued to the screen for every moment, and those who could barely keep their dinner down.

That run lasted until 1987, before Your Life in Their Hands enjoyed a third revival for BBC Two. Fawlty Towers star Andrew Sachs narrated the action, before velvet-voiced actress Barbara Flynn stepped in for the 2004 and 2005 series.

So it should come as no surprise that Surgeons: At the Edge of Life, a 21st-century exploration of medical procedures at Addenbrooke’s and Royal Papworth hospitals in Cambridge, has also found an eager and enthusiastic audience.

To date it has enjoyed four series, and follows surgeons as they undertake some of the most complex operations in the world: a workplace where technical skill is paramount, because even the smallest slip of the scalpel would lead to catastrophe.

Season five’s six-part run begins as specialists work against the clock to treat three patients. Among them is 33-year-old Ben who has crashed his motorcycle into a fixed metal gate. It’s clear the young man has injuries to his chest and lungs, and several serious fractures, but needs a CT scan to rule out any other hidden problems.

The medics also treat single mother Jasvinder, who has sustained spinal injuries after her car left the road at 70mph, as well as 72-year-old Jill, who has fallen down the steps of her caravan.

Whether you turn green at the gills when the action moves to the operating theatre, or if you’re an inch away from the screen dreaming of being in scrubs, there’s no denying the myriad human stories at the centre of this show make it truly compelling viewing.

Here’s hoping that, unlike its predecessor, it never needs to be revived.

The Apprentice (Thursday 19/01/23, BBC One, 9pm)

Preview by Richard Jones

While thousands of firms are wondering how they are going to pay their staff and bills, the contestants featured in the latest series of The Apprentice have their eyes not only on a quarter-of-a-million-pound investment from Lord Sugar, but also some prime-time TV exposure.

“The world’s now open for business,” the tycoon optimistically said in the trailer for this new 17th series in December. And he wasn’t wrong, as he immediately sent the wannabes off to the sun-kissed Caribbean island of Antigua for their first task, a fortnight ago.

Despite the idyllic setting, that particular edition didn’t end too well for many of the candidates, and the process didn’t get any easier when they were challenged to flog bao buns to the British public the following week.

Tonight’s show begins as the candidates are summoned to London’s Regent Street Cinema for an exclusive screening. There, Sugar reveals that they have to create a cartoon aimed at two-to-four-year-olds to pitch to industry experts.

Child’s play, you’d think. However, while one team showcases incomplete characters, the other presents a storyline that is sketchy to say the least. Then in the boardroom, it’s curtains down for at least one of the candidates.

This third challenge should be right up the street of some of this year’s ‘highly animated’ contestants, who, on the face of it, look like they would be more suited to the Love Island villa than the boardroom.

Take glamorous former flight attendant Victoria Goulbourne from Merseyside, for example. She started her online sweet business during lockdown, and it became a social media success.

Before this series, she already had more than 12,000 Instagram followers, a number that will go up further after her appearance on The Apprentice.

And then there’s Reece Donnelly. He runs a theatre school in Scotland, and has been in TV shows since he was a kid, as well as appearing in a telly ad for T-Mobile.

His selection alone seems to go against the show’s original aim in 2005 to champion ‘unknowns’ and Sugar’s words in 2011, when he said he wanted fame-hungry wannabes banned from his show. There’s no business like show business, these days, it seems.

At the beginning of the series, there was an eclectic mix of business people including two hairdressers, a city banker, a construction company director, a financial controller, an antiques dealer, a martial arts instructor, a pest controller, a professional canon-firer, a gold medal-winning boxer, a bridal boutique owner, a technology recruiter, a water sports equipment salesman, and a safari guide.

Two of those candidates even had the audacity to call themselves the ‘James Bond’ and ‘Kim Kardashian’ of the business world, but will either of those be hearing those infamous words “You’re fired!” tonight?

For those who make it past the ‘cartoons for kids’ task, there are more tough challenges to negotiate in coming weeks, including hosting immersive events and exploring the world of beauty products.

And you only have to take one look at the contestants’ social media accounts to know that’s likely to be the one most are waiting for.

Travel Man: 48 Hours in Dublin (Friday 20/01/23, Channel 4, 8.30pm)

Preview by Scheenagh Harrington

The suitcase is packed for more mini-breaks, as comedian Joe Lycett shows willing celebrity guests how to get the most out of a weekend away, with a fun-packed, 48-hour itinerary of trademark humour and facts.

Joe – who calls himself Mummy – was quite the headline star toward the end of last year. First of all he scored a satire bullseye in September, during his appearance on Laura Kuenssberg’s new BBC politics show, in which he famously declared he was “very right wing”.

He went on to ruthlessly troll short-lived Prime Minister Liz Truss, unveiling one of his own portraits of the politician, dubbed ‘In Liz We Truss’ on social media.

The Birmingham-born star then sent shockwaves through the media when the World Cup launched in Qatar, where homosexual acts are outlawed.

Joe called on football and gay icon David Beckham to renounce his support of the country over its stance on LGBTQI rights, threatening to shred £10,000 of his own money if he didn’t get a response.

Although he livestreamed himself apparently going through with the act, Joe later admitted it would have been “irresponsible” and had instead donated it to charity.

Mummy’s back on less controversial ground for this edition of the travel show, which comes from Dublin. He’s joined by comedian and fellow Taskmaster alumnus Mawaan Rizwan for two days of statues, swimming and swigging stout.

After a facial and shave at their hotel, the boys head out to explore the city via its statues. Yes, you read that right. Ten monuments across the Dublin have been given QR codes which, when scanned by visitors, allows the statue to ‘phone’ them. That’s how Joe and Mawaan are able to listen to wise words from Oscar Wilde and Molly Malone.

Having soaked up all that culture, the duo are understandably peckish, so it’s off for lunch at compact eatery Assassination Custard: 11 courses no less, all served up in a tiny sandwich shop.

After worshipping at the altar of Dublin’s smallest restaurant, they head to its largest tourist attraction, the Guinness Storehouse, which brings in a staggering 1.7 million visitors a year. As well as learning how to pour the perfect pint of the black stuff, Joe and Mawaan get their faces printed on it before it’s time to turn in for the night.

It’s hard to see how day two will top it, and it begins inauspiciously with a swim at Forty Foot, a spot where iconic author James Joyce described the sea as ‘snot green’ and ‘scrotum tightening’. Mummy and Marwan both agree it’s definitely a bit chilly around the nethers.

Following a quick trip to the gorgeous Trinity College, the comedians head to Windmill Lane studios, where they learn all about the story of Ireland’s answer to Abbey Road and lay down a track of their own.

Finally, it’s back to the bar to have a pint of – you guessed it – Guinness, and give their overall verdict on their weekend away. Will Dublin leave them delighted or depressed?