TV highlights 14/02/2012

Saving Private Ryan: The True Story 8pm, Channel 5 For those of you who have wondered how accurate Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan was, now, apparently, is the moment of revelation. If you want to know whether Tom Hanks put in a credible performance on the invasion beach as all hell let loose, there's a graphic re-creation and first-hand testimony. You can even find out the effects of a mortar shell on a human body. Plus, there's a look at the family who may have inspired the film. Martin Skegg First Love 8pm, Sky Arts 1 Apparently Shaun Ryder fell in love with the saxophone as a child while listening to his grandparents' Glenn Miller records but, instead of learning to play it, spent the next few years vandalising things and selling stolen goods. The following decades were dedicated to twisting his melon, touring the globe with Happy Mondays and Black Grape. He sets about reinvestigating the instrument with the help of Mobo-winning jazzer Soweto Kinch, who has three months to teach him to play, by which point he'll perform Miller's Tuxedo Junction with Jools Holland and his orchestra. Ben Arnold Friday Night Lights 8pm, Sky Atlantic Sky Atlantic tries to interest the UK again in this much-garlanded, if slightly overwrought, US high-school football drama. Like all the best dramas, it works by recalling that in the series as in life, the game – astonishingly authentically rendered as it is – is the backdrop, rather than the plot. This episode drops us into Dillon, Texas, at the start of the new season. Andrew Mueller How To Grow A Planet 9pm, BBC2 Flowers aren't wimpy. Flowers are hard. "Vicious, you hit me with a flower," Lou Reed once sang, and he may as well have been referring to the seeds of the canna indica flower, apparently used by those loyal to the British during the Indian rebellion of 1857 when they ran out of shot. But, as Professor Iain Stewart explains in this fascinating series, these delicate things were the driving force for the whole of life on Earth, "from the smallest insect to the largest mammal". Ali Catterall Big Fat Gypsy Weddings 9pm, Channel 4 It's time to point and stare at massive wedding dresses and booty-bouncing five-year-olds again. But wait! This new series promises to go beyond that. This week, it's all about the motivation behind the Gypsy look. "God wants you to look good for your first holy communion," says nine-year-old Nangirl. For her, this includes a tea-coloured spray tan and Lady Gaga nail extensions. Porsche-driving Delores offers the grown-up perspective, as she experiences the thrill of slipping on her cat-themed big fat Gypsy wedding dress. Hannah Verdier Frontline: My Father, My Brother And Me 9pm, PBS Parkinson's disease will eventually transform the sufferer from the person you once knew into someone physically and mentally quite different. Reporter Dave Iverson, like his brother and his father before him, has Parkinson's. This investigation skilfully mixes his family experiences with his objectives of reporting on the disease, its causes, and the political background to the debate about stem cell research, which continues to offer some hope for those who have Parkinson's, and those scientists whose profession is to fight it. John Robinson