Wednesday

Child Of Our Time: Turning 20

9pm, BBC Two

Launched with considerable fanfare back in 1999, the BBC’s Child Of Our Time project was set up as a groundbreaking, high-profile experiment to take us deep into the new millennium.

Following 25 children of widely varying backgrounds born in the year 2000 across the first 20 years of their life, the series was out to become not only an epic social documentary, offering a real-time picture of the changing face of life in Britain as the new century began; but also a highly scientifically-minded undertaking, conducted under the direction of Professor Robert Winston, aimed at answering the age old question of Nature versus Nurture. By observing the development of the kids in close-up, and conducting the odd psychological study along the way, the series hoped to uncover how much of who we are is the result of genes, and how much the result of environment. Are we born, or are we made?

Leaving aside, for a moment, that Child Of Our Time was never really as groundbreaking as all that (it always owed an enormous debt to ITV’s truly stunning Seven Up series), this was still heady, pioneering stuff. But the promise was never delivered upon. Having followed the project off and on across the past two decades, it’s hard not to conclude that the series dropped the ball - either that, or the BBC dropped interest in it.

For the first few years after the 2000 “Birth” show, there were regular updates on the children, with Child Of Our Time returning annually for well-publicised series consisting of three or four episodes apiece, in which Winston would explore different aspects of their development. But after 2008, things fizzled and tailed off drastically. The next updates came in truncated series in 2010 and 2013, and then there was nothing until a two-episode outing in 2017 – the last we heard of the project until this week.

Catching up with its subjects as they turn 20, this latest – presumably, last – edition should be the grand culmination of the entire experiment. But instead, it seems perfunctory, half-hearted and hasty, and lies all but buried away in the schedules. Winston is notable by his absence, and, rather than a series of three or four programmes, it is one meagre hour-long film, the bulk of which is given over to repeats of clips from the previous instalments.

For anyone who can dimly recall the hoopla with which the project was launched, the sense of an opportunity missed is overwhelming. All the more so because of the profound and rapid changes that have marked the twenty years during which the subjects’ generation has come of age, and which it could have documented: the unfathomable changes to the social and psychological landscapes brought about by mobile digital technology, the internet, social media and the rise of algorithmic artificial intelligence; the concurrent and perhaps conjoined changes in attitudes toward gender and identity; the spiralling issues around the pressures put on mental health.

This is all the more frustrating because, from the glimpses we get, the young subjects, their attitudes and their experiences, are just as interesting and as moving as those of the people who took part in the Seven Up series, the most recent update of which, 63 Up, was broadcast last year. However, Child Of Our Time has none of its value as a living social history, and comes nowhere near it in status as one of the most movingly, inadvertently human documentaries ever made. Maybe, though, it does tell us something about TV today, compared with the generation of TV that produced Seven Up: we really do have shorter attention spans now.

DAILY PICKS

Today

Storyville: Maiden - War On The Waves

9.30pm, BBC Four

Broadcast to mark International Women’s Day, a TV premier for director Alex Holmes’s documentary, reconstructing the story of sailor Tracy Edwards, who made history in 1989 when she became the skipper of the first all-female crew to enter the Whitbread Round The World yacht race. A 24-year-old cook on charter boats, Edwards faced an ocean of chauvinism and great storms of sexism when she set out on her dream: patronised by male sailors, the yachting press and wider media, and rejected by sponsors, who figured the women would just wind up getting killed at sea. But she persevered, putting her house and savings on the line to generate funds, building a team with enormous energy and inspirational leadership, and then setting out together to confound the critics at every turn.

Monday

Inside No.9

10pm, BBC Two

Far too soon, we’ve somehow reached the final story in this fifth series of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s devious modern classic anthology series. Fittingly, the curtain comes down with an episode in which the focus is (almost) entirely on the show’s creators. In one of their most claustrophobic two-handers, the action is confined to the front seats of police car No.9, occupied by PC Thompson (Pemberton) and his new partner, police community support officer Varney (Shearsmith), sharing a long night shift together, and killing time parked up in a deserted graveyard. Slightly irked by Varney’s manner, Thompson fondly recalls good times on stake out with his former partner Dobson…but just what happened to Dobbo? Regular director Guillem Morales keeps it creepy as the windows steam up. Meanwhile, the best news: Inside No.9 will return.

Tuesday

Ian Hislop's Olden Days – The Power Of The Past In Britain 9pm, BBC Four Hislop’s pugnacious three-part series was originally shown in 2014, but if anything seems timelier post-Brexit. Hislop examines the British obsession of dwelling on the past – often, a past that never quite existed. Rather than lovers of history, he casts us as nation in thrall to the idea of “The Olden Days… the vast realm of everything that has supposedly gone before. Some of it is in black and white.” This is no recent phenomenon: Hislop points out that the Britons of 1066 were already harking back to the good old days of the Dark Ages, and argues that our culture has evolved in part through a process of continually viewing the past through the prism of the present – reinventing fables and folk heroes to suit our changing needs and prejudices, to the point where the original truth is obscured.

Thursday

Breeders

10.35pm, Sky 1

Written by Thick Of It veteran Simon Blackwell, and starring Martin Freeman and Daisy Haggard, this new sitcom, about a couple discovering how hard it is to be the parents of young children, doesn’t break new ground, but it goes over the familiar territory with a fair bit of vitriol: “Jesus F***ing Christ!” screams the increasingly, despairingly angry Paul (Freeman) at his beloved little darlings. “How many times do I have to tell you to be quiet?!” Freeman and Haggard, as Paul’s wife, Ally, are well paired as a couple who probably love each other, but are gradually being ground down by their kids to the point where it’s everyone for themself – especially when it comes to getting up during the night. The great Alun Armstrong and Spinal Tap legend Michael McKean co-star as Paul and Ally’s respective dads.

Friday

Heavy Metal Britannia

9.30pm, BBC Four

It’s your actual Friday The 13th tonight, and what better way to celebrate than with a repeat of 2010’s quite horrendously entertaining Heavy Metal Britannia (10.15pm), tracing the spread of the virus across the UK from its emergence in the Midlands in the 1960s under the beady eyes of Black Sabbath. The film features a plethora of great quotes from various members of the Sabs (“When we did Volume 4 in 1972, the cocaine bill was more than the recording bill. And the recording bill was $80,000”), Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Budgie and other men of denim, hair and leather, including Lemmy, who delivers the last word on metal: “It’s great driving music. If you like driving into the sides of bridges.” A brilliant way to waste 90 minutes, if not your entire life.

Saturday

Miles Davis: Birth Of The Cool

9pm, BBC Two

There are so many facets to the life and career of the groundbreaking jazz trumpet player Miles Davis that any single documentary would struggle to contain it all. But while it can be often frustrating (for a film about music, it barely has the time to offer Davis’s pieces more than fleetingly), this profile by director Stanley Nelson makes a sincere attempt at covering all the territory: from his emergence as a teenager playing with big bands; through his frenetic bebop and meditative masterpieces of the 1950s and 60s; to his uncompromising fusion experiments of the 70s, and final 80s comeback. The film is more fascinating on Davis’s personal life: a stubborn genius on one hand, and an apparently often awful person on the other, as many witnesses testify.