Sunday

Big Blue Live

7pm, BBC One

Natural history fans will want to book the TV for this live broadcast from California’s Monterey Bay, which is currently playing host to one the most spectacular annual wildlife gatherings in the ocean, as sea otters, sea lions, birds, sharks and whales all flock to make the most of the bay’s bountiful waters. In the first of three programmes, Matt Baker, Liz Bonnin and Steve Backshall will be trying to spot the animals as they arrive and considering the remarkable journeys they have made to get there. While Backshall is on the lookout for humpback whales, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall looks at the history of whaling and the recent return of the whales to protected waters. Elsewhere, Baker gets personal with a shoal of sardines. There’s more live from the bay at 8pm on Thursday; look out, too, for Big Blue UK, a sister programme examining the life in Britain’s coastal waters, each weekday morning at 9.15am from tomorrow.

Tuesday

Goodness Gracious Me

10pm, BBC Two

The GGM team reunited for a one-off last year as part of the programming to celebrate the 50th anniversary of BBC Two. It turns out it wasn’t quite so one-offish after all, as they’ve been persuaded back together for another special tonight, this time going out as part of the BBC’s India season. Of course, given that the rub and pull between Indian and British culture and stereotypes in the UK was always their most fertile source of material, the very idea of an India Season prompts some the best gags – particularly in the opening sketch, in which a gathering of Indian TV executives half-heartedly kick around ideas for their own English Season: “How about… something about… the railways?” Elsewhere, alongside new spins on old favourites, there’s a twist on Blackadder (“Brownadder”), a game guest turn from Art Malik, and a chance to see a clip from Woody Allen’s film on the life of Gandhi.

Wednesday

A Brief History Of Graffiti

9pm, BBC Four

Sort of part of BBC Four’s Pop Art season, strutting art historian Professor Richard Clay presents this vibrant and fascinating film, exploring the history of ordinary people leaving a sign to say they were here: from the 30,000-year-old paintings in the Caves D’Arcy in France, through the messages carved into the walls of the Reichstag in 1945 by victorious Russian soldiers, to the wave of wildly painted subway trains and stations that revolutionised the New York scene in the 1970s – by way of humble messages carved into school desks and prison cell walls. As Clay puts it, all exemplify our primal urge to leave our mark, even – indeed, especially – when denied all other means of expression. The question is, “When does vandalism become graffiti? When does graffiti become street art? And when does street art become, well, art?” Among the contributors are NYC graffiti legend Lee Quinones and Jeffrey Deitch, the American curator who went down into the subways and helped artists like him, Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring become leading lights in the art world. “The art that emerges on the streets is absolutely real art,” Deitch says. “And the best is as good as the contemporary art that begins in the galleries.”

Thursday

Stephen Fry’s Central America

9pm, STV

A rare opportunity to see Stephen Fry’s face and hear him talking. For this four-part travelogue, he’s off enthusing his way through Mexico and the Central American isthmus, all the way down to the Panamanian border with South America. In a crammed first episode, he begins in Texas, travelling from El Paso across the border into Ciudad Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico, along a route well travelled by the region’s drug cartels. From here, on towards Chihuahua, taking in the history of Pancho Villa, whose legacy he encounters again later when he reaches the old silver mining town of Real de Catorce and their annual fiesta celebrating the revolution, with donkey racing. Fry’s packed itinerary also includes hallucinogenics, weird lizards and a role as a butler in a telenovela, before he finally wakes up in Acapulco – pretty much the usual weekend, then.

Friday

Resistance

9pm, More4

This new French import is set in 1940, as the occupied country falls under the heel of the Nazi jackboot and, in Paris, a group of rebels begins meeting secretly to plan their opposition, first by trafficking British airmen and starting production of an illegal underground newspaper, Resistance. Meanwhile, the forces of the Gestapo begin tracking them down. Focussing mainly on the youngest and most photogenic of the freedom fighters, it’s a slick enough production and ticks along in a way that’s easy to watch. A little too easy, perhaps: the series slips comfortably into a tradition of French occupation dramas that avoid many of the most difficult questions the period presents, to offer a comforting gang of plucky tragic heroes. It’s chocolate-boxy compared with something like (resistance member) Jean-Pierre Melville’s devastating 1969 movie Army Of Shadows, a nerve-shredding examination of how such heroes had to sacrifice what made them human, or Marcel Ophuls’s complex documentary on the occupation, The Sorrow And The Pity. But it’s better than Young Montalbano. Pauline Burlet, Cesar Domboy, Richard Berry, Tom Hudson star, with support from the great Fanny Ardant.