We’ll Take Manhattan (BBC4, 9pm)
World’s Greatest Daredevils (Channel 5, 8pm)
Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy (E4, 10pm)

ANEURIN BARNARD’S meeting with photographer David Bailey, the man he was playing in a TV drama, sounds quite an intimidating experience.

“The day I met Bailey, he didn’t come and say hello to me, he was doing his own thing – and then he looked straight at me with bullet eyes, like a bulldog, for about a minute before he opened his mouth,” recalls the actor.

It happened at the Vogue shoot he and Karen Gillan, playing model Jean Shrimpton, did with 74-year-old Bailey last year.

“Already you’re like, ‘God, does he like me or doesn’t he?’ You just don’t know and that’s the danger element to him – and the attraction – because he invests his eyes on you, they’re like, ‘zoom’.”

Barnard had planned to meet Bailey before filming the drama, but the scheduling didn’t work out. Instead, he researched everything Bailey had done up until the point we meet him in the drama.

“If you’re playing someone who’s alive, you want to make sure you’ve seen how they are, so that was my focus – how he moved, talked, breathed, looked,” he says.

Understandably, Barnard was nervous when he eventually met the great man.

“The thing with Bailey is if he likes you, you’re in and he looks after you. Luckily enough, he liked me, so we had endless banter throughout the day,” says Barnard.

The 24-year-old only graduated from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in 2008, but has already won an Olivier Award for best actor in a musical for the West End production of Spring Awakening.

We’ll Take Manhattan is a biopic in which he stars as a young David Bailey, the brooding and dynamic photographer along with model Shrimpton, played by Gillan, best known as Doctor Who’s companion, Amy Pond.

The drama focuses on the love affair between the swaggering East End boy and the shy girl from Buckinghamshire who met by chance at Vogue House.

There was an instant attraction and in 1962 they travelled to New York for Vogue and photographed what’s widely regarded as fashion’s most iconic shoot. The fashion story was Young Idea Goes West and combined raw, naturalistic photography and high fashion for the first time.

For his own part, Barnard hates having his picture taken or seeing himself in photos, which proved tricky during the promotion for Spring Awakening.

“I was just standing somewhere one day and all of a sudden people started staring at me and taking my picture and I wondered why. Then I looked around and I’m standing next to a 5ft poster of myself.”

WORLD’S Greatest Daredevils features a new breed of people seemingly willing to risk life and limb with dangerous activities no one has done before.

First up is Matthias Giraud, who’s at the cutting edge of extreme skiing and base jumping. He’s even combined the two to create a new sport that involves leaping off cliffs after tackling some of the world’s most hostile terrains.

We get to see gobsmacking footage of him narrowly avoiding an avalanche by deploying his parachute at just the right moment during a trip to the French Alps.

Chris Birch shows why he’s one of the UK’s leading freestyle motorcycle riders by performing a backflip, and there’s a chance to see British free-runner and former world tumbling champion Damien Walters discussing his work as a stuntman on new Bond film Skyfall.

AS the title suggests, Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy is the work of Noel Fielding, AKA half of The Mighty Boosh. And as anyone who has seen that cult series will be well aware, he wouldn’t know how to go about making a run-of-the-mill, predictable sketch show.

Instead, he’s combining animation, music courtesy of Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno, sitcom elements and sketches to offer something unique.

Characters include manta ray and music producer and shell-shocked games teacher Roy Circles. To give you a further idea of the surreal treats in store, the first episode also features two French chefs going to the moon.