ROSS KEMP BEHIND BARS: INSIDE BARLINNIE, STV, 9pm

LOCALS call it “the big hoose”, says Kemp, and it can’t help but sound funny in his Essex accent.

Admittedly there is a streak of humour in this programme which sees hard-man Ross Kemp go inside Barlinnie for 10 days where he’ll be locked in a cell and treated exactly like the other inmates – including being asked to drop his shorts for an inspection when he first enters the prison.

As he swaggers across the grounds in his orange tracksuit, we can hear the cons jeering at him from their barred windows.

How will the Glasgow boys react to me, he asks, an Essex lad? Being an Essex lad has nothing to do with it, surely? It’ll be the fact that you’re “Grant Mitchell from EastEnders” that’ll get the slaggings going.

In the “the bear pit”, he meets convicts and hears of their life in this notorious jail and asks whether it exists to punish its inhabitants, rehabilitate them or simply keep them off the streets.

LIVING THE DREAM, SKY1, 9pm

IF you don’t fancy a damp cell in Barlinnie then tune into Sky1 instead where you’ll get to sample the Florida sunshine.

This is a new six-part comedy drama starring Philip Glenister and Lesley Sharp. They play a couple, the Pembertons, from drizzly Yorkshire who pack their bags and set off for a new life in the US. You know already that things will not turn out as they’d hoped. A life filled with sunshine, Disney and freshly-squeezed orange juice is strictly for the holiday brochures, not real life.

They’ve invested their money in something you certainly don’t see in the tourist’s dream of Florida: a grubby trailer park.

They try to enjoy their new American life, but the pesky residents from the rundown park keep badgering them with their problems. They may as well have stayed in Yorkshire; at least there were no alligators there.