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TV highlights 21/11/2011

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Young Apprentice | The Choir: Military Wives | Britain's Greatest Codebreaker | The Boarding School Bomber | American Horror Story | Slavery: A 21st Century Evil

Young Apprentice
9pm, BBC1

The teams are off to Wembley Stadium for their latest challenge. Sugar appears to them on the giant screen, looming like an omniscient teddy bear, his voice echoing like a cockney deity. Nick and Karen stand beneath his giant fizzog like two tiny, angry dolls. Kinetic and Atomic must brand and pitch a new teenage deodorant and, as usual, do a much better job than the grown-up apprentices ever could. The Irish boy with the boofy hair still refuses to in any way bite his tongue or pause for breath. But they're teenagers so they're allowed to be dreadful. Julia Raeside

The Choir: Military Wives
9pm, BBC2

He may, in a certain light, appear to be a teenage Doctor Who fan on the skive from a minor public school, but choirmaster Gareth Malone is a lion where singing is involved. Which is, you'd guess, why he'll continue to prosper when the current vogue for massed voices passes. Meantime, his latest project, preparing a group of military wives whose partners have been deployed in Afghanistan to perform at the Royal Albert Hall on Remembrance Sunday, reaches its conclusion, with the women movingly contributing letters and lyrics to a song especially composed for them by Paul Mealor. Jonathan Wright

Britain's Greatest Codebreaker
9pm, Channel 4

Scattered in the gardens of Woking Crematorium are the ashes of a man who changed the world for ever; yet far from being heralded at the time for his staggering achievements – cracking the Enigma code, pioneering artificial intelligence and inventing the computer as we know it today – Alan Turing was instead hounded to suicide, aged 41. Gordon Brown's apology in 2009 came some 55 years too late. Ed Stoppard plays Turing in this drama-documentary. Ali Catteral

The Boarding School Bomber
9pm, BBC3

The argument that Islamist suicide bombers are motivated by oppression and/or poverty is back-breakingly lumbered with the uncomfortable truth that many such killers have little about which to complain. This docudrama introduces an archetype of the syndrome – Andrew Ibrahim, public school-educated son of a pathologist, currently serving 10 years for preparing acts of terrorism. The figure that emerges is not of a redoubtable revolutionary, but of a lonely, confused attention-seeker. Hearteningly, he was shopped to police by his local Muslim community, doubtless weary of such bandwagon-chasers. Andrew Mueller

American Horror Story
10pm, FX

Another deliciously unpleasant episode, as Vivien decides that, on reflection, living in a ghost-infested, murderer-attracting mansion is not worth the wonderful price she got it for, even in this economic climate, and puts it back on the market. There's confusion for Ben, who

keeps waking up in the garden with no memory, and a shocking conclusion, suggesting no character is safe. Rebecca Nicholson

Slavery: A 21st Century Evil
10.30pm, al-Jazeera

Slavery is an inhumanity we would prefer to think of as having ended some time in the mid-19th century, but, as this documentary series has demonstrated, there still persist discrete methods of enslavement – from bonded slavery to sex slavery and child slavery. Tonight's episode concentrates on slavery in the Chinese prison system. Here, prisoners can be literally worked to death – a hidden workforce helping fuel China's economic boom. John Robinson


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