HD Heads-Up: April 6

Prime’s new Channel 5 series, Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons (9.35 Wednesdays from April 19), lives up to its title by having crime journalist Paul Connolly actually being locked up in some of these hellholes. “I lost all concept of time,” he says of one experience. “I couldn’t separate reality and fantasy. I walked out and, when I turned to do my piece to camera and tried to explain what had happened, I broke down. Every time I tell the story I still well up a little bit. It strips you of your personality” …

However, one skeptical critic wrote of Connolly entering Poland’s Piotrków prison: “Connolly wasn’t just going to film there, he was checking in for real, right down to the intimate search procedures. I’m not sure if we were meant to be shocked or impressed as he interviewed the man probing his body with a rubber glove. Maybe, in some circles, delivering your piece to camera while someone shines a torch up your nether regions is the ultimate badge of journalistic nerve. To me, though, the scene belonged in a Woody Allen film” …

Countered The Times: “It was all pretty bleak, and the message remained obscure, while the tabloid approach allied to a whizz-bang-wallop production became exhausting. Yet there was a visceral charge, urgency and excitement that simply couldn’t be denied” …

Prime will screen the network movie premiere of Age of Heroes on Easter Monday at 8.35 whereas Three’s HD coming attractions for that weekend are all re-runs: The Last Airbender (7.00 Saturday), The Book Thief (9.00 Saturday), Mental (11.35 Saturday), Pretty Little Addict (1.35am Sunday), Guilty at 17 (3.10am Sunday), Titanic (7.00 Sunday), American Reunion (10.10 Sunday) and G.I. Joe: Retaliation (8.30 Thursday) …

Three will premiere season 21 of The Graham Norton Show on April 21. The line-up will include Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Jack Whitehall, Gemma Whelan and Take That. It airs this week in the UK while booked for episode two are Miranda Hart, Warren Beatty, Keeley Hawes, Peter Capaldi and Jennifer Hudson …

The same week Three will farewell Married At First Sight Australia with a double episode (7.30, April 19) ahead of the premiere of House of Hypochondriacs, in which three self-confessed hypochondriacs put themselves on the frontline of UK health services …