Lorry Ladies, BBC1, 7.30pm
IN the 1970s, Angela Rippon became the first woman to regularly present the news for the BBC. As a result, her fame transcended her day job and she popped up on numerous other programmes, even showing off her previously unknown dance talents to great effect alongside Eric and Ernie on the 1976 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show. Now she’s meeting fellow trailblazers, albeit they are of a different kind. Female lorry drivers are not exactly unheard of, but those she interviews during a trip to Northern Ireland have taken the profession to a new level. Here they talk about their passion for the open road and why, after a long week behind the wheel, they like nothing better than attending truck festivals held throughout the country.
The Bermuda Triangle Enigma: Fallen from the Sky, C5, 9pm
IF you were planning a programme about mysterious, unexplained events, who would you get to present it? Perhaps Professor Brian Cox or someone else of that ilk. Channel 5, however, is clearly opting for a more low-brow approach to the subject because it’s Rick Edwards and Ortis Deley who are taking charge of this three-part documentary. They want to know more about the Bermuda Triangle, a place that, legend suggests, is the centre for a series bizarre events. Are conspiracy theorists right, is there really something strange happening there, or are they all just bound together by coincidence? These are just some of the questions Deley hopes to find out in Florida, where he investigates the disappearance of five naval aircraft in 1945, while Edwards dives beneath Bermuda’s waves to see if the wreck of a 1963 US Air Force plane holds any clues.
Who Do You Think You Are?, BBC1, 9pm
STRICTLY Come Dancing head judge Shirley Ballas investigates a family story that said her maternal great-grandmother abandoned her husband and children for a more exciting life in America, and what she discovers casts her relative in a completely new light. The ballroom dancer and teacher also pursues a rumour that she has black ancestors on her father’s side – and follows a trail that leads her to colonial Cape Town and the era of slave trafficking to South Africa by way of the Indian Ocean.
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