PICK OF THE BOX; Shell's back where she belongs.

DRAMA

Bad Girls (ITV, 9.00pm)

AND you thought Footballers' Wives was outrageously unbelievable. Welcome back to the banged-up babes of Larkhall's G Wing.

Bad Girls returns for a fifth series and we're promised as much madness and mayhem as was contained in the previous four.

Last year's cliffhanger ended with a bomb exploding on G Wing as porn star Snowball attempted to escape.

Shaz the teenage poisoner is dead, but several other inmates are also trapped by the explosion.

Deciding a weekend away is required to recover from the trauma, bad-boy prison officer Jim Fenner decides he and his (male) colleagues need a bit of R&R.

So off they trot to Amsterdam for a porn weekend - and who should be the dominatrix in the first bar they stumble into but Shell Dockley.

Yes, G Wing's former top dog, having escaped (with Fenner's help two series earlier) is captured and returned to her old stomping ground.

If you can't wait until tonight, there will be snippets of Bad Girls on GMTV - where Jack Ellis and Debra Stephenson, who play Fenner and Shell, are guests - and This Morning, where Claire King, who plays Karen Betts, drops in.

FOOD

The Nation's Favourite Food (BBC2, 8.00pm)

FANCY a bit of lunch? Join our top chefs for a rundown of the 10 dishes that make up our favourite dish for the middle of the day.

Arabella Weir counts down the lunches while Ainsley Harriott and Gordon Ramsay, among others, offer their thoughts on what's hot and what's not on our plates.

They're unimpressed by the fact that pasta and soup feature in the Top 10, with Ainsley suggesting we should make our own soup, not eat tinned stuff or - even worse - dried soup from packets.

FACTUAL

Horizon (BBC2, 9.00pm)

THE documentary strand investigates the fatal air crash in New York in November 2001.

American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into a suburb of Queens, killing 260 people. Coming just two months after September 11, it was almost a relief when the disaster turned out not to be terrorist-related.

However, an investigation soon revealed frightening implications for every airline, pilot and passenger.

The plane that crashed was an Airbus A300-600 and when the wreckage was salvaged, it became clear that the plane's tailfin had simply snapped off in mid-air. There had never been such a catastrophic failure of a critical structure of an aeroplane in the entire history of aviation.

This powerful film has access to all the key players, including American Airlines, Airbus, investigators at NASA and families of the victims.

It recreates the critical moments leading up to the crash in a simulator and analyses the different scenarios of what might have happened in detail.

SOAP

River City (BBC1 Scotland, 8.00pm)

MONEY talks - and a five-figure sum from Lewis is telling Cormac that he should say so long to Shieldinch in the Scottish soap.

Ruth is particularly unhappy that Lewis is trying to buy Cormac's silence and even more unhappy that it looks like he's succeeded.

So she tells Cormac she wants nothing more to do with if he's going to keep the 50K from Lewis.

A miserable Cormac then goes to Ruth's mother Gina and tells her he's leaving Shieldinch. He asks her to pass on a gift to Ruth - the Celtic knot he'd been planning to give her before they split up.

At the Hendersons, the unpaid bills are piling up and Brian is worried that the police might find out he's the one who trashed the Portakabin.