TV tonight: glass-ceiling smashers pull anti-female prejudice apart

Mary Beard and guests look at the effects of stereotyping on women in power today. Plus the Essex couple with £60,000 to spend on their garden … Here’s what to watch this evening

Inside Culture With Mary Beard

7.30pm, BBC Two

Beard is back with the fifth series of her curious cultural review show. In tonight’s opener, the classicist explores what thousands of years of stereotyping women means for those who are in positions of power today. To unpick this, she is joined by Valerie Amos, the first Black woman to serve as a minister in the British cabinet, along with a group of female guests who have smashed many a glass ceiling. Hollie Richardson

Unreported World

7.30pm, Channel 4

Thailand is experiencing a cryptocurrency revolution, after the pandemic left many citizens cash-strapped and jobless and eager to boost their fortunes. From the founder of the largest Thai cryptocurrency exchange to a farmer who trades crypto from his hammock, Jonathan Miller interviews a range of people to find out more about this new way of earning. HR

Your Garden Made Perfect

8pm, BBC Two

Tonight, Essex couple Agata and David have £60,000 (that is not a typo) to do their garden up. Cue three designers eager to proffer their virtual ideas – but which one will the couple choose to turn into reality? HR

Death in Paradise

9pm, BBC One

Series finale time, and it’s checkmate for reclusive chess grandmaster Julius Rotfeld (David Sibley), who dies during a comeback match – poisoned via one of his own pieces. DI Neville Parker (Ralf Little) tries to get to the bottom of it while attempting to mend his heartbreak via online dating. Meanwhile, commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) faces the very last person he was expecting to see. Ali Catterall

Dating No Filter

10pm, Sky Max

Fast becoming a firm favourite on the Friday night schedule, London Hughes, Emily Atack and Tom Allen are among the celebrities analysing footage of tonight’s blind dates. Pocket-sized rapper Aaliyas is looking for “a LeBron James type” but, as Hughes puts it, “LeBron isn’t gonna be in Liverpool, babe.” HR

The Graham Norton Show

10.35pm, BBC One

RuPaul is in the house with Norton tonight talking all things Drag Race, along with Oscar-nominated Power of the Dog star Benedict Cumberbatch and Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones. Regard and Years & Years team up to perform their single Hallucination live. HR

Film choices

The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951) 1pm, BBC Two
There’s a distinct touch of Jesus to Alec Guinness in this brilliant 1951 Ealing satire. His wide-eyed, unworldly scientist, Sidney, invents a cloth that never gets dirty and lasts for ever. Of course, this will not do, as the textile industry would become defunct, so an unholy alliance of capital and labour races to prevent him bringing it to the public. Master director Alexander Mackendrick sets the scene with a lightness that belies the tragic beating down of Sidney’s creative impulses – from the musical plops and parps of his lab apparatus to Joan Greenwood’s mellifluous turn as the factory owner’s daughter. Simon Wardell

Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2019), 12.45am, Film4
A remote town in Brazil is attacked by trophy hunters in search of human prey in Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sly modern western, which riffs on 30s horror The Most Dangerous Game. The first sign that something is wrong comes when the settlement vanishes from online maps, but matters soon turn bloody. Udo Keir is in charge of the braggadocious post-colonial invaders, but he little realises that the good folk of Bacurau, including Sônia Braga’s doctor and Silvero Pereira’s outlaw, have a fierce community spirit and psychotropic drugs on their side. SW