Blue Lights
9pm, BBC One
Love is in the air as we rejoin Belfast’s peelers for a third season of the award-winning cop drama. Grace (Siân Brooke) and Stevie (Martin McCann) may be happily sharing cupcakes and house hunting on their shift (hurrah!), while Shane (Frank Blake) has now earned the team’s trust. But we know by now that this show likes to toy with our emotions – and things quickly get grittier as the officers are roped into a drug ring circling both the city’s estates and elite parties. Then there are all the personal dilemmas they’re dealing with. This show remains brilliant, taking you from laughing at this lovable lot one moment to gasping at what befalls them the next. Hollie Richardson
Secrets of the Brain
9pm, BBC Two
As we prepare for AI to pretty much replace human intelligence, now is a good time to celebrate and investigate the 600m-year-old story of the brain. In this two-part Horizon documentary, Prof Jim Al-Khalili is an engaging teacher as he unravels all the remarkable mysteries of the squashy things in our heads – starting by looking at worms in Italy. HR
Panorama: The Truth About Asylum Hotels
8pm, BBC One
Many people are far from confident that the BBC will ever tell us the truth about “asylum hotels”. However, Rahil Sheikh’s documentary aims to set the record straight, hopefully including the important information that claiming asylum is not illegal and that immigrants are only in hotels because the last government allowed the claims system to crumble. Phil Harrison
Lucy Letby: Murder or Mistake
9pm, Channel 4
Quite unusually, Daniel Bogado’s documentary about both sides of the Lucy Letby case has been screening in cinemas, under the title Conviction: The Case of Lucy Letby, and it is now split into two parts for a TV double bill. It follows Letby’s new barrister and the prosecution’s expert witness Dr Dewi Evans, as well as a family who encountered Letby with their newborn. HR
Task
9pm, Sky Atlantic
We move further into the darkness, in terms of subject matter – and also literally, thanks to the gloomy cinematography – as the dour crime saga continues. Troubled FBI guy Tom (Mark Ruffalo) stays on the trail of the abducted child he desperately wants to believe is still alive. Is he about to take an unacceptable risk? Jack Seale
Will & Ralf Should Know Better
10pm, U&Dave
The Two Pints of Lager … lads are back on tour, with a series of madcap challenges to test their friendship (genuine, longstanding) and maturity levels (low). First up, it’s a game of lifesize toy soldiers near Brackley, Northamptonshire, which is home to one of the UK’s largest tank collections outside of the British military. Ellen E Jones
Film choice
Joyland (Saim Sadiq, 2022), 12.35am, Film4
This heartbreaker of a film looks at the liminal existence of transgender people in Pakistan. The gentle Haider (Ali Junejo) is a disappointment to his father, being childless and unemployed; even his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), goes to work. Then he gets a job as a backup dancer to charismatic trans performer Biba (Alina Khan) at a Lahore “erotic dance theatre”. The allure of transgression leaks into his life, and that of his family, in a world where patriarchal tradition warps and suffocates everyone. Simon Wardell