Television: Today's Pick

Timewatch (9pm BBC2) Ever since the collapse of Communism, programmes like Timewatch have been trawling the newly-opened Soviet archives to fill out the history of that momentous epoch. They have now reached rock bottom - with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself, the conscience of the Revolution. Except that Lenin (pace decades of Soviet propaganda) was not a rock, but a man - an ill man with a French mistress, a liking for chess and Beethoven (both surpressed for the sake of revolutionary purity) and one who blithely dictated countless barbaric acts from the comfort of his summer house at Gorky (he likened the Red Terror of 1920 to "milk pudding"). Bill Cran's film ends with a haunting, never-before-seen photograph of Lenin near death - his skin the colour of stewed tea, his eyes utterly lost.

The Turner Prize (9pm C4) It has to be said that artists are a more fun lot than writers - and the Turner Prize ceremony has a more colourful history of heckling and controversial speeches than the Booker. Tonight's two angles of contention are the all-woman shortlist and the fact that there are no painters on it - the latter point being addressed by Waldemar Januszczak, Roger Scruton and others on Channel 4 at 11.35pm.

The film

Ten North Frederick (1.35pm C4) An odd film from the end of Gary Cooper's life, when he was already visibly suffering from the cancer that would kill him less than two years later. He seemed to be questioning - and then dismissing - the persona that he had built up in films like High Noon and Mr Deeds Goes to Town, that of the honest if monosyllabic ("yup") American stoic. Here he plays a decent lawyer pushed into political ambition by his wife - his very decentness the agent of his ultimate failure.