Programme Information

Formula 1 – Australian Grand Prix

Sunday 27 March

6.00-9.00am BBC ONE and BBC ONE HD

• www.bbc.co.uk/sport

David Coulthard and Martin Brundle commentate as a new Formula 1 season gets under way

Jake Humphrey introduces live coverage as the eagerly anticipated 2011 Formula 1 season begins in Australia.

Last year, Britain's Jenson Button took the chequered flag by 12 seconds in a race that began in damp conditions. The 2009 world champion gambled early on by switching his McLaren to dry tyres; it was a decision that moved him into second place, and when pole-sitter Sebastian Vettel's day ended in a gravel trap, Button inherited the lead and never looked back. The now-injured Robert Kubica finished second in his Renault, with the Ferrari of Felipe Massa completing the podium.

Martin Brundle and David Coulthard supply the commentary.

Formula 1 – Australian Grand Prix is simulcast in HD on BBC One HD on Freesat channel 108, Freeview channel 50, Sky channel 143 and Virgin Media channel 108.

LW

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Grace (Sue Johnston) has a personal interest in the team's latest case

The Cold Case team are called to a chamber of a little-known subterranean river, in the third story of the final series of the popular crime drama. The corpse of notorious Falklands' veteran-turned-peace activist Piers Kennedy – missing since 1983 and rumoured by conspiracy theorists to have been killed by the state – has been found ... directly under the Ministry of Defence.

Piers, formerly a leading light of the Young Conservatives, changed fundamentally after a bullet wound he received in battle became infected. Disgusted with the army, he joined the peace movement. In doing so, he gave the Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons an incalculable boon – a right-wing war hero speaking up against nukes. Boyd investigates this most political of conversions and Piers's mysterious disappearance.

Boyd focuses on the founder of the CANW, Ralph Palmer. The co-founder of CANW, his partner Bonnie Yorke, was having an affair with Piers, the movement's new poster boy. Meanwhile, the woman who Bonnie replaced, Piers's jilted fiancée, Lucy Christie – daughter of the junior Minister for Defence at the time and now a Tory MP herself – has substantial motive too.

Grace has a personal interest in the case – she was an anti-nukes demonstrator in the Eighties and had a passionate but fleeting relationship with one of Piers's fellow veterans, Murray Stuart, a wired and apparently dangerous individual who is sitting on a giant secret.

As the team burrow deep into the paranoid, polarised world of early Eighties British national security, they uncover camcorder footage of masked CANW activists performing a guerrilla attack on a nuclear convoy. The masked men were involved in a clash with the police and an MoD policeman was killed. The team realise they have just watched the very thing MI5 wanted to stay hushed up...

Piers Kennedy is played by Adam Rayner, Det Supt Peter Boyd by Trevor Eve, young Ralph Palmer by Michael Cantwell, adult Ralph Palmer by Jack Shepherd, young Bonnie Yorke by Elize Du Toit, adult Bonnie Yorke by Penny Downie, Lucy Christie by Anna Chancellor, Dr Grace Foley by Sue Johnston, young Murray Stuart by Kieran Bew and adult Murray Stuart by John McArdle. Waking The Dead also stars Wil Johnson as DI Spencer Jordan, Tara FitzGerald as Eve Lockhart and Eva Birthistle as Det Supt Sarah Cavendish. Solidarity is written by Ed Whitmore.

RN

Cycling – World Track Championships

Sunday 27 March

3.00-5.15pm BBC TWO

• www.bbc.co.uk/sport

Ore Oduba presents coverage of the final day of World Championship cycling action from the Omnisport Velodrome, in Apeldoorn, Holland.

Victoria Pendleton will be hoping to upgrade the silver medal she won in the women's Keirin last year and keep Great Britain's medal push going. Team GB men's and women's team pursuit squads were both in top form at the recent World Cup in Manchester, and they are now dreaming of translating those performances into major championship medals.

There is also a chance to see highlights of the men and women's omnium events – the latest addition to the Olympic programme.

Commentary comes from Hugh Porter and Chris Boardman, with track side reports from Jill Douglas.

LW

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Professor Brian Cox travels from the fossils of the Burgess Shale to the sands of the oldest desert in the world to show how light holds the key to understanding the whole Universe, including our own deepest origins, as he concludes his epic journey.

Light has always been central to human life. At one of the most magnificent archaeological sites in the world – the Temple of Karnak in Luxor, Egypt – Brian watches the sunrise during the Winter Solstice, and contemplates how our ancient ancestors built monuments to capture light from the heavens.

For thousands of years people have used light as a guide across seas and sands, but now it is also a guide to the secrets of the Universe. Yet to understand how light holds the key to this understanding of the Universe, one must first understand its peculiar properties. Brian considers how the properties of light that colour desert sands, the spectrum of a rainbow and the waves of water that pound the shore, all add up to give a unique insight into the history and evolution of our Universe.

Breaking the sound barrier in a Hawker Hunter fighter jet, he explains how the speed of light allows us to measure not just distance across the Universe, but also time. And he looks back across the light years to see how the Universe began.

Finally, with some of the world's most fascinating fossils in hand, he considers how, but for an apparently obscure moment in the evolutionary history of life, all the secrets of light may have remained hidden. Because although the Universe is bathed in light that carries extraordinary amounts of information about where we come from, it would have remained invisible without a crucial evolutionary development. He holds in his hand a fossil of one of the very first creatures to have an eye. Only because of that evolutionary development can we now observe, capture and contemplate the incredible wonders of the Universe that we inhabit.

KS3