Sticks and Stones | Gardeners World | Heavy Metal Britannia | True Blood
Sticks and Stones
7.30pm, Channel 4
Hannah Murphy's film looks at a forgotten hate crime: the abuse of people with disabilities. It's supposed to be different, supposed to have changed: when Fiona Pilkington took her own and her disabled child's life in 2007 after suffering a decade of harassment, disability crime was meant to be on the public agenda. But the depressing experiences of those in this film attests to a society that's apathetic at best; they're still routinely victimised. There's a whole catalogue of disgusting behaviour, mainly from local tyrants looking for easy pickings, and unconcerned by the cost, suffering and anguish.
Gardeners' World
8.30pm, BBC2
Whether you roam daily through your manicured orangery or grow cress on a windowsill in a damp flat, there's still pleasure of a kind to be had from the return of Gardeners' World. There's plenty of backbreaking slog to be getting on with for the year ahead, though these days we must conduct it without the corduroyed spirituality of Monty Don at the helm. Toby Buckland is out in the vegetable garden trying to hack through the iron sod, while the charismatic Carol Klein will be looking at relationships between plant families.
Heavy Metal Britannia
9pm, BBC4
"Once upon a time, there was no heavy metal music, anywhere," points out the latest Britannia doc. Imagine. Except you don't have to, because, back in the days when the UK still had steelworks to provide deafening inspiration, it was invented – mostly by Black Sabbath, but with important contributions from Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, among others. This gloriously entertaining doc lays out the whole story, much helped by self-deprecating interviewees who turn the quote level up to 11. Diamond Head's Brian Tatler talks devil worship: "I think that most bands will deny that they're in league with Satan."
True Blood
10pm, FX
Sookie and Bill aren't fighting any more (yet), so, as with last week's opener, the character focus tonight is spread a little wider. The excellent Jessica continues to adjust to vampire life, tricking her well-intentioned but surprisingly naive babysitter Sookie into taking her home for a family visit, which doesn't exactly work out for the best. Meanwhile, Lafayette finds an ingenious use for a hip replacement (at least he's not dead), and Jason gets more deeply involved in the Fellowship of the Sun, who aren't exactly fond of the fang.
