Telly Today: Whales, organic farming in Salento and Bedfordshire Police

TV Highlights for Sunday, December 3rd…

In the first episode, Whales and Us, in this four-part series Steve will free dive with iconic whales and their dolphin cousins, getting closer than ever before to these ancient mariners and witnessing new and rarely seen behaviours.

In immersive stunning blue chip natural history sequences we’ll see mighty sperm whales, caring humpback whales, intelligent killer whales and ingenious bottlenose dolphins, exploring their complex social relationships, revealing their surprising hunting techniques, and discovering that just like us, many whales have close family units.

As a naturalist, conservationist and Sky Ocean Hero Ambassador, Steve will team up with world-leading scientists to confront the uncomfortable and urgent truths of overfishing and pollution, along the way uncovering how whales and dolphins are adapting to changing oceans in unexpected ways.

Joining whale advocates across the globe who are already achieving great conservation successes, Steve will discover why whales are essential for the health of our oceans, what we can do to ensure their survival and ensure the most remarkable conservation story of all.

Sky Nature at 8 pm

In the final episode of his latest cooking series Gino D’Acampo travels on his Vespa, further South along Puglia’s heel to Salento, riding along its Adriatic coast to the port of San Foca.

Here, he meets an Italian free-diving champion who still fishes with a spear underwater like the Ancient Greeks. Gino dives in, searching for sea bass for the dinner table. Back on his bike, he heads to the western Salento coast to learn about the secrets of organic farming in Salento’s rich soil where giant onions grow alongside strawberries and the best low-starch new potatoes are found. On the edge of a still and beautiful Ionian Sea, Gino cooks his spoils: pan-fried sea bass with a new potato salad, which goes down with a splash.

Across this series, Gino has had a holiday odyssey, both on land and in the depths of the sea, to discover his homeland’s true hidden gems as he explored the well-kept food secrets of Italy’s deep South in Puglia and Basilicata.

ITV1 and STV at 7.30 pm

The new twist on the Oliver Twist story is brought to life by CBBC.

June 1838. After a year of living on the run, Fagin, Dodger and the gang return to London to pull off their biggest mission yet – to rob the Crown Jewels during the rehearsal of Queen Victoria’s coronation.

Can they steal it from beneath her very nose?

There is one man who stands in their way – the American President and guest of honour, Martin Van Buren. Other lead characters include the prissy crown jeweller John Bridge, the long-suffering Archbishop of Canterbury William Howley and Chief Yeoman Warder Royston Pickford.

CBBC Channel at 4.50 pm

The UK’s biggest and most successful true crime documentary series returns with a feature-length special telling the gripping inside story of an armed siege in a tower block.

It is 6am on a quiet Sunday when a man rings 999 to report that he’s seen a man with a weapon that looks like an AK-47 rifle and that he’s shouting that he’ll shoot the next person he sees in the head. The call has come from a block of flats in Bedford where two men have already blockaded themselves in a flat.

As one of the men inside begins posting live on Facebook, armed officers from Bedfordshire Police are ordered to surround the building…

Featuring unprecedented access to the command suite during a live siege, cameras follow operation lead Superintendent Steve Ashdown as he admits, ‘if we do on this occasion discharge our guns and somebody gets killed, it’s absolutely right that the public has access to everything I knew about what was going on at the time.’ Following every twist and turn of the incident as it becomes more critical, this is a real-life drama where the facts are more compelling than the best crime fiction.

Channel 4 at 9 pm