What’s on TV tonight: Junior Taskmaster, Roy Wood Jr hosts Have I Got News for You, and more

Friday 8 November

Junior Taskmaster
Channel 4, 8pm
The devilishly simple premise of Taskmaster – setting daft challenges for comedians to see how they manage (or not) – has made it one of Channel 4’s most popular shows, now in its 18th series after moving over from Dave in 2020. It’s a must-do for many rising stars, who say it’s as much fun to participate in as to watch. Now comes this junior version for nine to 11-year-olds. Rose Matafeo takes the helm as the Junior Taskmaster in place of Greg Davies, while Mike Wozniak (like Matafeo, a former Taskmaster contestant) has a ball as her sidekick (replacing “Little” Alex Horne, who devised both shows). In the opening heat, contestants Anita, Lazer, Nyarah, Persia and Reuben attempt challenges that include throwing objects into a large hat on Wozniak’s head and sniffing mashed potato. As ever, close reading of the task ora little lateral thinking might have pointed to an elegant solution rather than the messy route chosen by some in the latter challenge. Matafeo and Wozniak’s warm-hearted interactions with the contestants – and the children’s remarkable confidence – give this family friendly iteration of the show a very different, though equally entertaining, vibe. VL

Our Lives: The Boy Who Could Fly
BBC One/BBC Two Wales, 7.30pm
Another warming Our Lives documentary, this one about Scotsman Liam Byrne, who has chased his dream of flying like a bird (in reality using a wingsuit) since he was a boy. Now, at 23, he’s one of the world’s youngest top-tier BASE jumpers.

Gardeners’ World
BBC Two, 8pm
A sign that autumn is properly here as this series comes to a close. But spring is never far away – so Monty Don starts to plant tulips for next year, as well as a hawthorn hedge in the orchard. Arit Anderson visits a nursery that specialises in hardy perennials, while Sue Kent meets a gardener who has radically transformed the topography of her plot.

Have I Got News for You
BBC One, 9pm
Comedian Roy Wood Jr, who presents the newly unveiled American version of HIGNFY, hosts the original for a special one-off. The rather insipid US iteration is more about quips than satire, so it will be interesting to see how he interacts with old-handers Ian Hislop and Paul Merton and their guests, dry-witted author and presenter Richard Osman and comedian Roisin Conaty.

Hotel Portofino
U&Drama, 9pm
The lovely-to-look-at period drama moves to a new channel (from ITVX) for its second series; all is not well for Lucien (Oliver Dench) and his new bride Rose (Claude Scott-Mitchell), made worse still when his mother, Bella (Natascha McElhone), calls him back to Italy to lend a hand.

Gilda (1946, b/w) ★★★★★
Talking Pictures TV, 6.50pm 
Film noirs don’t come much headier than Charles Vidor’s sultry little number, about a two-bit gambler (Glenn Ford) in wartime Buenos Aires who gets snarled up in a deadly love triangle. Rita Hayworth is the vixen from Ford’s past, who pops up right on cue to marry his new employer, a casino owner played by George Macready. Cinematographer Rudolph Maté’s lush photography is second to none.

The Holdovers (2023) ★★★★★
Sky Cinema Premiere, 8pm 
Alexander Payne’s best film since Sideways (2004) is a beautiful period piece set in the snowy surroundings of a New England boarding school. Paul Giamatti plays a curmudgeonly classics teacher who, stuck on campus over winter break, strikes up an unlikely bond with his sullen student Angus (a star-making turn from Dominic Sessa). Da’Vine Joy Randolph won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her turn as grieving dinner-lady Mary.

The Falling (2014) ★★★★
BBC Two, 11.05pm 
This swooning, atmospheric study of schoolgirls’ blossoming sexuality has an uncanny power capable of placing you under its spell. Director Carol Morley’s film is set in a stuffy English girls’ school in 1969, where Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) and Florence Pugh (as always, excellent) are an infatuated odd-couple caught up in an alluring tale of a hysterical fainting epidemic. Picnic at Hanging Rock for Gen Z.

Airplane! (1980) ★★★★★
Channel 4, 12.05am 
This spoof disaster movie is still one of the most quotable comedy films ever made. It stars Robert Hays as Ted Striker, an ex-fighter pilot called on to fly a plane after its pilots are taken ill mid-flight. A pre-Naked Gun Leslie Nielsen plays a deliciously deadpan doctor who’s seemingly never heard of the Hippocratic Oath. “Surely there must be something you can do,” he’s asked. “I’m doing everything I can. And don’t call me Shirley.”

Television previewers

Stephen Kelly (SK), Veronica Lee (VL), Gerard O’Donovan (GO), Poppie Platt (PP) and Gabriel Tate (GT)