Going solo

CANADA is an extraordinary place. The population, about half the size of the UK, (34 million and rising), inhabits the second largest country in the world, though most people live within spitting distance of the US border.

Having travelled the world with old mate Ewan McGregor for The Long Way Round and The Long Way Down, the eponymous star of Charley Boorman’s Extreme Frontiers is tackling the land of maple syrup, ice hockey and countless perils.

He’ll be in the most easterly point of Newfoundland, where he begins his journey.

Boorman also learns the skills of lobster trawling, goes dirt-bike riding in a forest, and dives to a wreck in Lake Huron.

Boorman has spent a lifetime in the glare of cameras’ spotlights. As a child, he had a bit-part in Burt Reynolds epic Deliverance, and then watched his dad, John Boorman, transform the filmed footage into the classic it became.

Roles in his dad’s movies Excalibur, The Emerald Forest and Hope and Glory helped boost Charley’s profile, but it was while working with Ewan McGregor on 1997 offering The Serpent’s Kiss that his life changed.

Their friendship led to a couple of global adventures, and while Ewan may now be concentrating on movies again, Boorman is still happily turning out shows such as By Any Means and this series.

Unlike some shows where the book of the series can be a yawnsome cash-in, Boorman’s offer a valuable insight into many of the adventures that were skipped on TV or wound up on the cutting- room floor.

He explains: “A book is more about what you’re thinking about in your head, while television is a visual version of that, so it doesn’t necessarily capture everything, and so that’s why it’s nice to give people the opportunity, to be able to write both.”

Obviously he’s in much demand to do round-the-world programmes such as this, but would he like to return to acting one day? “Yeah, I’m looking at bits and pieces of stuff to do, but it’s just getting someone willing to give me a go, and I’d love to get back to acting, I really would.”

LINDA CARTY was born on St Kitts in 1958, when it was still a British colony. As a result, she is regarded as a British citizen.

She’s also spent nearly ten years on Death Row in Texas, having been found guilty of abducting and murdering a 25- year-old woman, so that she could steal her four-day-old son.

All her appeal attempts have been denied, and she’s running out of options. No date for her execution by lethal injection has been made yet, but her only way to escape it is if the Governor of Texas offers her clemency. If he doesn’t, she will become the first British woman since Ruth Ellis to be executed.

This documentary not only examines Carty’s case, and reveals that no forensic evidence links her to the crime, there’s also a remarkable insight into Carty’s pre-jail life too, focusing on the abuse she suffered, her efforts to raise a child alone, her career as a primary school teacher, and how she was blackmailed into becoming a Drugs Enforcement Administration informant.

EVEN if you haven’t seen the classic movie The Great Escape, chances are you’re familiar with the true story on which it’s based.

On a freezing night in March 1944, 76 prisoners escaped from a PoW camp, Stalag Luft III, in Germany, having spent a year digging a tunnel from their hut to the woods near the camp.

But how did they get rid of the tonnes of sand they excavated, how did they make the civilian-style clothes they wore and forge the documents they needed once on the outside?

All those questions will be answered in this fascinating documentary.

A group of serving RAF airmen attempt to replicate aspects of the escape to see if they have the necessary skills to effect such a break-out, while surviving veterans who helped construct the tunnel explain what happened on the night.