Suspects
(Channel 5, 10pm)

HAVING taken a battering from BBC2’s Line Of Duty in the battle for viewers, C5’s new cop show Suspects was pulled mid-series earlier this year. Now a cast that includes Fay Ripley, Clare-Hope Ashitey and Damien Molony tries again with the rest of the run, starting with a two-parter tonight and tomorrow night with plots that were improvised from a detailed description.

For newcomers, DI Martha Bellamy (Ripley) conducts the questioning of suspects; DS Jack Weston (Molony) is the man of action, while DC Charlotte “Charlie” Steele (Ashitey) is passionate yet level-headed.

In part one Martha’s neighbour, barrister Jonathan Moxton, is discovered at home with serious head injuries, his wrists bound and knickers stuffed in his mouth. Jack suspects he was involved in a sex game gone wrong, but perhaps Saul Hammond (Dominic Power) is to blame, and possibly Moxton’s wife Tanya (Charlie Brooks) knows more than she’s letting on.

“Really I am playing myself doing this job to a certain degree, or a version of myself, doing this job and that’s what appeals and then by definition it’s got to be believable,” explains Ripley.

“Laughter on sat was a serious problem.

Often you can get away with it, ‘Oh, come on guys, pull yourself together’, but because we were running at 100mph, we didn’t choose to, but if it happened every day at some point that we were uncontrollable in our laughter, we were holding things up, and that was not funny, because we had 12 minutes for each scene. It’s the worst thing to say to people, ‘Please stop laughing’, because obviously all you need to do then is just laugh.”

Damien Moloney admits he jumped at the chance to play Jack Weston. “One of the reasons I took the job was because it was unlike anything I’d ever done before,” he explains. “One of the greatest days on set was when Faye brought in her ‘nutty nuggets of deliciousness’.

They lifted a crew that had been working flat out for five-and-a-half weeks.”

So at least there was a little improvised eating to halt the laughter.

Secrets from the Asylum
(ITV, 9pm)

MOVIE hardman Ray Winstone shows his softer side when he delves into his past with this Who Do You Think You Are?-style show.

It’s the first of two programmes in which famous faces discover how their ancestors coped in Victorian asylums.

Winstone pays a visit to Colney Hatch Asylum in north London, where his great-great grandmother’s first husband was committed in 1875. There’s also a chance to see Al Murray, better known as jovial licensee the Pub Landlord. He follows in the footsteps of Vanity Fair author William Makepeace Thackeray.

Actress and singer Claire Sweeney gives us an insight into how senile dementia and old-age mental health was treated in the 19th Century.

Operation Wild
(BBC1, 9pm)

CLARE Balding is off to Japan where she meets vet and inventor Dr Keiichi Ueda. He has spent the last dozen years attempting to improve the life of a dolphin with very little tail. The results make for some of the most touching viewing of the week.

Meanwhile, Steve Leonard is in the rainforest of Laos where vets attempt ground-breaking keyhole brain surgery on an endangered moon bear. In Florida he meets Martha, an alligator with a chronically blocked gut.