Prime to Deliver Extraordinary Trio

Prime will reinvigorate its schedule with three top documentary series in the first week of September, starting with 9 Months That Made You, which will screen in the Prime Planet slot (7.30 Sundays).

The Independent said this “mesmerising take on the miracle of life shows the BBC at its best” while The Telegraph described it as a “model documentary [that] showed – clearly but without being patronising – the order in which we are created.”

Home Media magazine said the three-part programme “takes viewers through the journey of human gestation and its minute-by-minute genetic process.

“Told through a series of personal stories that introduce viewers to people born with surprising and unexpected differences, the programme explores just how complex the human gestational process is.

“With the help of CGI, the programme goes inside the womb to re-create the growth process of a foetus”.

Highlights include the Canadian children whose futures were forged during one of history’s fiercest ice storms, the Guevedoces in the Dominican Republic who change gender at puberty and seeing presenter Dr Michael Mosley eat black pudding made from his own blood.

Airing 7.30 Tuesdays from September 6 will be The Wonderful World of Gordon Watson, which screened earlier this year in the UK as The Extraordinary Collector.

“The collector in question is Gordon Watson, one of those fortunate people who has managed to turn his compulsion – in his case, the acquisition and sale of 20th-century art – into a profitable living,” said The Guardian.

The premiere follows the 59-year-old, who says his hardest client ever was Madonna, “as he pitches to a dream client – Lord Jacob Rothschild, both a connoisseur of antiques and one of Britain’s richest men.

“The real selling point, however, is the rare glimpse into Rothschild’s estate, and its own extraordinary collection.”

The same week Prime will premiere a US reality series that could be worth watching: Nightwatch (8.30 Wednesdays).

It’s a Dick (Law & Order) Wolf-produced series about emergency workers on the night shift in New Orleans.

Entertainment Weekly praised it for being “a brutally honest snapshot of the city’s most improvised corners” while New York’s Newsday said: “Nightwatch isn’t merely well produced, with clean, striking visuals and a sharp clarity in which even shadows seem to come into focus, but it’s also alive with the sounds of a beautiful, vital and (most often in the dead of the night) dangerous city.”

And MediaLife magazine reckons “the skilful exposition of story and character make the show a good choice for people who haven’t seen too much first-responder content on TV. It might even please some people who think they have.”