(All times pm unless stated.) The Century Speaks
Will the Real Aaron Copland Please Take a Bow? (6.30 R3). A portrait of the US composer, by Leonard Slatkin.
An American Portrait (7.30 R3). More Copland music - live - including his "play-opera" The Second Hurricane, which is also discussed in the interval by Anthony Burton ( Twenty Minutes , 8.25).
The Wrecks of Condor Reef (7.00 C4). A reef off Cambodia searched for wrecks (repeat).
House Detectives (7.35 BBC2). A new series of architectural-historical sleuthing with Dan Cruickshank and Judith Miller begins with a Jacobean house that may have a Shakespearean connection. The Public Record Office's Nick Barratt researches house details for the series, and has his own corner on the website.
Archive Hour: Coventry Blitz (8.00 R4). The autumn of 1940 recalled.
The Hunger Business (8.00 C4, also Sunday 8.00). The start of a "Who'll Save Africa?" season (Saturday and Sunday 8.00 C4) begins with the Nigeria-Biafra conflict of the 1960s and the aid effort that prolonged the war, the two programmes go on to show how relief agencies have found themselves being manipulated by those in power, most notably in Ethiopia. The second programme also deals with more recent aid debacles in Sudan and Rwanda.
Timewatch: Tank (8.05 BBC2). A repeat about the "wonder weapon of World War One".
The Forgotten Volunteers (9.15 R2). About the Black and Asian soldiers who fought for Britain in the First and Second World Wars.
Shakespeare Lecture (10.00 R3). David Dabydeen of Warwick University on "Prospero's Pagans".
Watching (11.00 BBC2). Tom Sutcliffe on close-ups and cinema's "desire to show the audience something bigger than it's ever been seen before".