Oh no, not Friday night already!

The Friday Night Project

10pm, Channel 4

WHAT is it about the schedules late on a Friday night that compels TV executives to ditch any sense of quality and opt for the most banal and juvenile of programme formats?

Ah yes, alcohol.

Presumably the programming executives assume that anyone watching TV after 10pm on a Friday has either been in his or her armchair consuming a rapidly dwindling alcohol supply or swaying in a pub drinking its plentiful stock of alcopops until compelled to stop by nausea. Our heavy-drinking culture may be causing a furore, but it clearly works well for some TV shows.

Anyway, here's another new programme to add to the long and undistinguished list. It's a comedy entertainment show featuring comics Jimmy Carr, Rob Rouse, Sharon Horgan and Lucy Montgomery.

Each week the team will be joined by a celebrity guest host, with tonight's being Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels star Vinnie Jones. Music is provided by Fightstar, Charlie from Busted's new band. The celebrity guests all have to perform set tasks, with supposedly hilarious consequences. One of the tests is to open the show with a monologue and there will be other games, including one where the guest host takes to the streets to use their power of celebrity to get people to do funny or unusual things. Wow, we've never seen that before.

As if that were not enough, there's also Abi Titmuss making a special appearance in her Mystery Sex Tape Challenge, using her powers of seduction on a mystery celebrity. There's so much good stuff on Channel 4, isn't it about time we had some decent shows late on a Friday?

There would be no losers. Most viewers would welcome the change and the people who have been pickling themselves in alcohol all evening wouldn't notice the difference.

A Dream Home Abroad

8pm, Five

There are no surprises with this new series, during which George Clarke (left) follows 10 families as they take on massive house- renovation projects on the Continent. Tonight we hook up with a Yorkshire couple who buy a property in Normandy to turn into a BB.

They do not speak French, but move to a village where no one speaks English.

They have no experience of renovating, but the property is in need of a complete revamp.

In Search Of Myths And Heroes

9pm, BBC2

"God made man, so the Africans say, because he loved to hear stories," says historian Michael Wood at the start of this programme. And few tales could be more fascinating than that of the Queen of Sheba.

With clips from classic films, such as MGM's 1959 epic Solomon And Sheba (starring Gina Lollobrigida as the Queen herself, left), and interviews with experts, tonight's programme kicks off what promises to be a magical series on the world's greatest myths. Was Sheba fiction or is her story true? Wood starts in Jerusalem looking back 1,000 years before Christ and his quest soon takes him to Ethiopia, Egypt and what one expert calls the start of globalisation. Enchanting.

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