Miguel's Feasts, Ten, 6pm

Watching Miguel's Feasts for me was like having a nightmare come to life. Miguel – he of the endless energy and world's biggest smile – is the human equivalent of having 600 termites fall down your shirt. A regular on Channel Ten's infomercial – er, sorry, "television home/lifestyle" show The Living Room, Miguel is harmless yet immediately irritating. I'm sure many people find him charming and enthusiastic, but I just . . . can't. If you like watching a man whose hyperactivity can put the Energiser Bunny to shame and whose smile freaks me out, then go ahead and be my guest. Just remember that those batteries never, ever run out.

Wild Kitchen, ABC, 6.30pm

Probably not a must-watch for vegetarians, but Wild Kitchen will make a good addition to the cooking-show rotation of keen home chefs. Indigenous chef Clayton Donovan is the star, but so is the food. It's great to see Australia's abundant natural ingredients shine in his dishes. Donovan is a natural in front of the camera, and in this he offers kangaroo and venison, plus spatchcock with blood limes.

Underground Britain, SBS One, 7.30pm

What's on the surface is only half the picture, as this insightful British documentary reveals. Deep below Britain is a treasure trove of history – human remains, building ruins and endless clues about how previous inhabitants of the influential island lived. Focusing on the green locale of Scotland, host Rob Bells gets down and dirty, literally, underneath the country's well-renowned beauty. Bells and his crew explore several locations, among them a rather stomach-churning spot known as Sculpture's Cave, which, in times gone by, was a place where both corpses and the living were beheaded as part of a ritual that honestly makes no sense. What I like about Underground Britain is that, in the face of thousands of years of diverse history, it doesn't try to answer all the questions raised. Instead, they comfortably present at-times-chilling revelations about how people of the past lived, and died, that don't necessarily need answers to make them fascinating. If you're into history, this series will be the cheese to your mousetrap. But even if the past isn't on your top-20 list, it's still well worth a look. (Warning, pun ahead.) It's an unearthed gem (groan).

Alana Schetzer

PAY TV

Petals on the Wind, SoHo, 8.30pm

V.C. Andrews' incest epic continues, with this latest telemovie picking up the story 10 years on from last week's Flowers in the Attic. Cathy and Chris Dollanganger (now played by Rose McIver and Wyatt Nash) are living together chastely in South Carolina. He's studying medicine, she ballet, and they're both trying to ignore the fact that they still have the hots for each other. They're also trying to look after poor little Carrie (Bailey Buntain), who is a bit messed up from being locked up in the attic with them for all those years. Cathy soon finds herself distracted by romance with an abusive British dancer (Will Kemp) and by her own plans to confront her wicked mother and grandmother (the marvellous Heather Graham and Ellen Burstyn). It's a nutty sort of melodrama, but watchable all the same.

Marple: A Caribbean Mystery, 13th Street, 11.30am

Agatha Christie purists will be aghast at some of the baffling liberties taken in this season of feature-lengthMarple mysteries. Here, for instance, we have super-sleuth Jane Marple (Julia McKenzie) crossing paths with Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. Still, the bones of the mystery remain the same, and the cast includes the likes of Hermione Norris and Antony Sher.

Brad Newsome

MOVIES

The Proposition (2005), SBS One, 8.30pm

Unfolding in the brutal Queensland outback of the 1880s, the third feature from director John Hillcoat (Ghosts of the Civil Dead, The Road) is not only a bloody western, but a trial for all involved. When Ray Winstone's Captain Stanley, an English policeman, surveys the arid landscape and mournfully remarks, "What fresh hell is this?", you know that the filmmaker is in his element. Stanley, accompanied by his wife, Martha (Emily Watson), sees himself as an instrument of progress. The outback has already broken Arthur Burns (Danny Huston), a criminal outcast Stanley is hunting. The lawman's solution is to hunt down Arthur's brothers, Charlie (Guy Pearce) and young Mikey (Richard Wilson), telling the former that unless he kills Arthur, the latter will be hung on Christmas Day. Written by Nick Cave, the picture keeps you at a distance: cinematographer Benoit Delhomme captures the outback at the breaking of light, but the reverie is punctuated by bouts of violence as heads explode from gunfire and floggings tear away flesh.

World War Z (2013), Premiere Movies (pay TV), 10.20pm

Last year was a terrible one for giant walls in Hollywood movies: other-worldly monsters destroyed one protecting Sydney in Pacific Rim, while a vast swarm of zombies overcame another protecting Jerusalem in this capable zombie disaster flick. The film itself also overcame some prominent barriers, beginning with the source material – Max Brooks' bestselling novel – being an episodic oral history without a centre. The picture kept many of the telling details from the book, such as the advantage of bicycles over cars, but created a new storyline with Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, a former UN investigator who gets his family out of Philadelphia when a zombie epidemic quickly spreads worldwide (these screen zombies sprint) and then goes searching for a cure. There are several large-scale scenes, befitting a blockbuster, but the extensively reworked movie works best as an intimate thriller with the undead lurking inside what were once their homes and workplaces.

Craig Mathieson