Wildest Islands, SBS One, 7.30pm

Tonight, this beautiful series explores the Philippines, home to spectacular coastlines, forests and mangroves. Made up of more than 7000 islands, the country sits on the so-called "ring of fire", making it vulnerable to earthquakes, typhoons and volcanic eruptions and yet it is packed with rare species that thrive in its tricky environment. Put your feet up and let the tranquil music and images transport you.

Criminal Minds, Seven, 8.30pm

This show scares the pants off me and I'm not sure I want to be this creeped out at 8.30pm on a school night. After an opening sequence featuring a distraught woman crawling through dark West Virginia woods in 1965, we come back to the present day and a man in his dark West Virginia trailer opening a brew. What's that noise outside? Who's that knocking at the door? Don't answer it! When he does, a barbed wire noose drops down from the roof of the trailer and you get the feeling he won't be finishing that beer. When a second man is found dead in the woods, killed by a bear trap also made from barbed wire, the brainiacs at the Behavioral Analysis Unit are flown in on their private jet to work out who is offing woodsmen in such a brutal way. Is it the legendary Mountain Man or something even scarier? Cue fingers in ears, eyes closed, loud humming. Yikes.

Julia Zemiro's Home Delivery, ABC, 9pm

The premise is simple – Julia Zemiro takes her comic heroes back to their roots to find out how their upbringing informs their comedy. Leaving Australia, Julia flies to England's north east to meet Geordie comedian Ross Noble. "Words and ideas tumble out of him," she gushes before Ross pulls up in an old Morris Marina and they head to his home town of Cramlington, best known for its razor blade and  paracetamol factories.  "I really feel like a '70s detective," he says as they drive to his old family house, now someone else's home.  "This bears almost no resemblance at all to the house I grew up in," says Noble, before launching into a series of anecdotes about rope ladder swings on the banisters, sitting nude on the window ledge staring out at the surrounding farmland and climbing through the serving hatch. "Life was the height of ordinary," he says.  Pleasingly nostalgic without being sentimental, this is great TV.

Kate Duthie

PAY TV

The Incredible Dr Pol, Nat Geo Wild, 7.30pm

It's practically a prolapse special tonight. Cat uterus, dog uterus, cow uterus, even the odd amniotic sac – it's all hanging out in Michigan. But septuagenarian surgeon Jan Pol and his team go about their business calmly, and pretty much everything's still alive at episode's end, including cows with twisted stomachs, a horse with a tumour on its eye, and a duck that had its foot badly bitten by a snapping turtle. If Pol's methods seem a bit rough and ready, well, that hasn't gone unnoticed by his peers. Other vets have been vocal in their criticism of Pol ever since this series started in 2011, and last month the Michigan licensing authority (which fined him and put him on probation in 2012) opened a new investigation into his work.

Death Row Stories, CI, 7.30pm

This instalment of Werner Herzog's four-part documentary about American death row prisoners is a captivating one. Herzog is in Texas to interview Hank Skinner, who in 1993 was convicted of a triple murder that he says he didn't commit. Although Herzog visits the crime scene and reviews  the case, the film is mainly a profile of an intelligent if eccentric man who is uncommonly articulate and evocative in describing the emotional effects of two decades spent locked up in the shadow of death.

Brad Newsome

MOVIES

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), SBS One, 11pm

Many a novelist, poet and photographer has become a fine film director. And there have been painters, too: Robert Bresson (Pickpocket), Jean Negulesco (Three Coins in a Fountain) and Walerian Borowczyk (The Margin), to name just three. One would naturally expect a painter to be able to create arresting screen images, with their talent for evoking emotion and insight by how things are framed. But what about the editing, where they have to coherently cut hundreds of images together? Perhaps surprisingly, most are brilliant at it. Bresson and Borowczyk are two of the finest exponents of film montage in history, while American painter, sculptor and now filmmaker Julian Schnabel is also startlingly good.

Wishing to film Jean-Dominique Bauby's first-person account of  the stroke that left him mentally cognisant but physically immobile, Schnabel needed to create for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly a cinema language that would invite the audience inside Bauby's head and understand the nightmare of being unable to communicate – a nightmare heroically overcome. Schnabel was helped in that he had Jean-Jacques Beineix's poetic 25-minute documentary on Bauby, Assigne a Residence, as inspiration, but Schnabel ultimately forged his own approach after scriptwriter Ronald Harwood suggested the film should begin with Bauby's blinking left eye as "the camera". This is an astonishing film in every way, even rescuing the male gaze from decades of fear and denunciation, and seeing it as a vital part of the life-force that courses through men, no matter how difficult their situation.

About Time (2013), Masterpiece Movies (pay TV), 6.25pm

This new film from Richard Curtis (Love Actually, The Boat that Rocked) is about a man (Domhnall Gleeson) whose 21st birthday present is to be told by his dad (Bill Nighy)  he can travel in time. Derided on release, and certainly guilty of never fully pushing its ideas, it is a mildly heart-warming pleasure.

Scott Murray