John Davies looks for useful TV and radio programmes (all times pm unless stated.) Pick of the week Let us consider two approaches to (visual) art on Sunday. First, on Channel 5, art historian Tim Marlow presents High 5 (12.30) a straightforwardly informative series in which he visits four public art galleries and talks about the five most popular paintings in each, beginning this week with the National Gallery of Scotland. Marlow can also be heard contributing to the less coherent Sunday Feature: But Is It Art? (5.45 R3), which asks whether advertising can be taken seriously as art.
SATURDAY February 5
Imperial Visitors (2.30 R4). David Dabydeen of Warwick University on how Victorian and Edwardian Britain appeared to visitors from the countries it had colonised.
SUNDAY February 6 Final Frontier (8.00 am BBC2). The Open University's "magazine of the cosmos" for February includes a profile of Mark Armstrong, British supernovae discoverer.
High 5 (12.30 C5). See pick of the week.
Solar Empire: Edge of Darkness (3.00 Discovery Channel). Information on the outer edges of our solar system, with news from the Cassini mission to Saturn.
Acting for the Deep Future (5.40 R4). Actor Jack Klaff on his year as professor for the public understanding of science at Starlab in Brussels.
Sunday Feature: But Is It Art? (5.45 R3). See pick of the week.
Blair's Thousand Days (8.00 BBC2). Michael Cockerell with the inside story on the abolition of hereditary peers.
War in Europe (8.00 C4). Part 2 of series on last year's Kosovan conflict has interviews with politicians, generals and civilians on how the war was fought. Later, Girlfriends from Pristina (11.55 C4) is more personal: the story of Vale and Teuta, friends since the age of six but separated during the Nato bombing. One is now in Macedonia, the other in Glasgow. (More on Kosovo's refugees in Monday's Panorama - 10.00 BBC1.)
MonDAY February 7
Start the Week (9.00 am R4). Guests include Birkbeck's Alan Stewart, talking about Philip Sidney and Elizabethan politics.
To the Ends of the Earth: Death, Deceit and the Nile (8.00 C4). Richard Burton, John Speke, their search for the source of the Nile and their subsequent feud.
Night Waves (9.40 R3). With Miranda Fricker, editor of the new Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy.
TUESDAY February 8
Adoption on Trial (9.00 C4). Season of C4 programmes on the British adoption system begins with documentary about three children just "graduating" from care. Later in the week, Dispatches (Thursday 9.30 C4) looks at the overall picture.
The Enemy Within (9.00 R4). Geoff Watts's three-parter about the human immune system, featuring Bristol University immunologists Neil Williams, David Raith and others.
WEDNESDAY February 9
Tuning into Children (11.00am R4). How five to nine-year-olds develop a sense of identity.
THURSDAY February 10
The Material World (4.30 R4). The European Space Agency's Mars probe.
Churchill's Secret Army (8.00 C4). How the Special Operations Executive helped with D-Day and profited from an agent in China but failed to assassinate Hitler.
Document (8.00 R4). The discovery of a rare medieval painting in a Suffolk stable.
Horizon: A Miracle in Orbit (9.30 BBC2). Marking the tenth anniversary of the Hubble space telescope's launch.
More programme info can be found at www.thesis.co.uk. Email: Davieses@aol.com