Serengeti (BBC1, 8pm)

THE females take centre stage as competition hots up between the families. Lioness Kali and her sister are enjoying being together with their cubs. Hunting is much easier together and life is good. But their happiness is short-lived when male lion Sefu begins to stalk them. Cheetah and new mum Kike moves to the area and must quickly learn to protect her cubs from predators, while Bakari the baboon struggles to raise the baby he rescued when its mother was killed and desperately tries to find a female to help him.

Mad Cow Disease: The Great British Beef Scandal (BBC2, 9pm)

ALTHOUGH it was regularly in the headlines in the late 1980s and 1990s, many viewers probably haven’t thought about BSE, or mad cow disease, in years. But as this documentary looking back at the scandal points out, we are still living with the aftermath in the form of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), which has killed almost 200 people since 1996. The film looks at how this still incurable and entirely manmade disease came to be a problem and finds the story starts in the 1970s, when supermarkets were emerging into the high streets and meat consumption was going through the roof. To help keep up with demand, farmers started feeding cows an artificial supplement made from the remains of other animals. The documentary also looks at how a series of poor decisions failed to stop the infected cattle getting into the food chain.

Why Can’t We Sleep? (STV, 9pm)

NARRATOR Ranvir Singh explores the impact that a lack of shut-eye is having on the nation’s health and why it could be reaching crisis levels. The programme will look at some of the reasons we’re not nodding off at a decent hour, while people who have struggled with insomnia and related problems visit one of the world’s leading sleep research centres.

Catch-22 (C4, 9pm)

ON a surreal trip, reluctant bombardier Yossarian – or Yo-Yo, as the central character has been renamed for this TV adaptation – begins to realise the magnitude and influence of Milo’s business empire.