TV tonight: Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds are outstanding in a stirring war epic

The Guardian

20-07-2025

9.15pm, BBC One
Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds are outstanding as the younger and older Dorrigo Evans, a war hero turned surgeon, in this haunting second world war drama. Based on Richard Flanagan's Booker prize-winning novel, the Australian epic tells Dorrigo's story over three timelines: a promising student who is engaged to be married into a well-to-do family; a Japanese prisoner of war who witnesses unimaginable horrors while building the Burma railway; and a retired traumatised man who is grappling with his past – including an intense and illicit love affair with his uncle's wife Amy (Odessa Young) – while doing publicity for his memoir. A stirring watch. Hollie Richardson
8pm, ITV1
Lauren Lyle returns as the young Scottish cop with the gumption to unravel ice-cold historic cases. This time round it's a doozy: the unsolved kidnapping of an oil heiress and her baby at the height of the miners' strike. ('Scotland's John Paul Getty,' mutters her boss.) Pirie and her team must piece together what really happened outside a Fife chip shop 40 years earlier. Graeme Virtue
8pm, Channel 4
Jimmy Doherty already has zebras, meerkats and capybaras at his wildlife park in rural Suffolk. But brown bears? That's a different matter. After launching a huge appeal to fund the building of a new home for Diego from Sweden, Jimmy also needs to find him a suitable flatmate – and what if they don't get along? Ellen E Jones
8pm, BBC Four
Nicholas McCarthy was born without his right hand and he is the world's only professional one-handed concert pianist. He's making his Proms debut with Ravel's atmospheric Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (which pianist Paul Wittgenstein commissioned after losing his right arm in the second world war). HR
9pm, Channel 4
Elisabeth Moss (with an English accent) leads this espionage thriller written by Steven Knight. She plays MI6 spy Imogen, who is recruited by the CIA to go undercover and find out whether French woman Adilah El Idrissi (Yumna Marwan) is an Isis operative. Will Imogen be able to learn the truth and stop a terrorist attack? HR
10.20pm, ITV1
Kate Kniveton is a former MP who was abused by her husband, ex-Conservative minister Andrew Griffiths, for more than a decade. She has since campaigned for a ban on domestic abusers from seeing their children. In this candid documentary, Kniveton shares her story, listens to others' and shows the work she's doing. HR
The Amateur, out now, Disney+
Rami Malek lends his disquieting intensity to this surprisingly enjoyable spy thriller. He plays a mild-mannered CIA cryptographer sent on a bloodthirsty revenge quest after his wife is killed in a terrorist attack. What's fascinating about this film is that, had the lead been any other actor, it would have devolved into generic pulp. But Malek, in the hands of director James Hawes, really leans into the character's psychopathy. He has a dead-eyed stare throughout, the sort you'd usually expect to find on a film's antagonist. Sure, this is a globe-trotting Bourne-style romp, but you're never allowed to forget the ethical iffiness of, say, blowing someone up inside a swimming pool. Stuart Heritage
All-Ireland Senior Hurling: Cork v Tipperary, 3pm, BBC Two The championship final at Croke Park, Dublin.