Saturday’s best TV: Kate Tempest Presents; Stop All the Clocks

Fiery poet Tempest gets a Saturday evening showcase, and there’s an absorbing love letter to the artistry of WH Auden in our age of anxiety. Plus: more Strictly!

Kate Tempest
Spreading the spoken word … Kate Tempest. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters

Saturday’s best TV: Kate Tempest Presents; Stop All the Clocks

Fiery poet Tempest gets a Saturday evening showcase, and there’s an absorbing love letter to the artistry of WH Auden in our age of anxiety. Plus: more Strictly!

Kate Tempest Presents

10pm, BBC2

With her Mercury prize nomination and Ted Hughes award, Tempest has done more than most to spread the spoken word, but can this best-seen-live art form survive a transition to the screen? The BBC is starting small, with a 30-minute, one-off collection of performances from 19-year-old Isaiah Hull and proud Yorkshire lass Kate Fox, as well as Tempest herself. It’s all part of the inaugural Contains Strong Language festival. Ellen E Jones

Strictly Come Dancing

6.45pm, BBC1

The Saturday staple is more warm-hearted than ever, thanks to Shirley Ballas joining the judging panel. She’s the queen of constructive criticism and the perfect foil to Craig Revel Horwood’s pantomime villain. This week, the couples face the first public vote, which means one duo will be foxtrotting off home. Aston Merrygold and Debbie McGee are sitting at the top of the leaderboard, but who’ll impress the crowd tonight? Hannah Verdier

Britain Afloat

8pm, BBC2

Mary-Ann Ochota hosts a series in which boats help us set sail for some solid social history. Tonight opens with barges, working crafts that “evolved to be easy”. One hundred years ago, the Thames was mad with barges, the workhorses of the estuary, most carrying 100 tonnes a time – the load of four HGVs. It’s not a glamorous story but it is engaging, never more so than in the person of Jimmy Lawrence, on barges man and boy, and brimming with songs and lore. John Robinson

The X Factor: Bootcamp

8pm, ITV

After Strictly smashed it in last week’s ratings war, The X Factor staggers on. In a year of fewer live shows and more of everything else, this is the first of three instalments from a bootcamp phase that will add an arena audition round. Firstly, though, it’s the amusing Wall of Songs, where contestants sprint, tussle and barter to acquire their chosen cover version, to be performed in hastily assembled groups riven by rivalry and unequal technical ability. Jack Seale

Stop All the Clocks: WH Auden in an Age of Anxiety

9pm, BBC2

Thirty-five years after Adam Low made the documentary The Auden Landscape for the BBC, he returns to WH Auden’s work, viewed through the prism of today’s “age of anxiety”. Alan Bennett, poets Paul Muldoon and James Fenton, the artist Todd Stone and Richard Curtis, who famously used Auden in Four Weddings … discuss his enduring relevance and how his work resonates amid the tumult of the 21st century. An absorbing love letter to Auden’s artistry. Ben Arnold

Rock Poet: Jim Morrison

8pm, Sky Arts

Few groups occupy a territory between the arcane and the mundane (or the inane) quite as conspicuously as the Doors; their legacy spanning dazzling enigma (The End) and Vegas-style awfulness (Touch Me). Or at worst, the sound of a snarling drunk barking doggerel over music resembling the theme to Tales of the Unexpected. This Jimfest offers two documentaries about the band, plus The Doors Live at the Hollywood Bowl ’68. Ali Catterall

First Humans: The Cave Discovery

7.55pm, More4

Documentary chronicling the efforts of boffins from the University of the Witwatersrand to figure out what we’ve learned from the trove of hominin fossils discovered in the Rising Star cave complex in South Africa. The finds have included a previously unknown human ancestor, homo naledi, among much else. More than 1,500 fossils have been retrieved, and they’ve added significantly to our understanding of how we got here. Andrew Mueller

Film choice

Transcendence, (Wally Pfister, 2014), 11.15pm, Channel 4

Transcendence
Pinterest
An impressively ambitious AI drama … Transcendence. Photograph: Peter Mountain/AP

That knotty problem of our times (see Ex Machina, Her), the potential sentience of machines, raises its head in Wally Pfister’s somewhat scorned but impressively ambitious AI drama. Johnny Depp is a hi-tech Frankenstein whose creation of a self-aware computer attracts violent retribution, leading to the uploading of his own consciousness that reduces him to a mere pixellated presence. Meanwhile, Rebecca Hall and Paul Bettany fly the flag for humanity. Paul Howlett

The Edge of Love, (John Maybury, 2008), 11.35pm, BBC2
A passionate account of Dylan Thomas and the two free-spirited women in his life. Matthew Rhys is the poet, Sienna Miller his wife Caitlin and Keira Knightley his childhood sweetheart-turned-nightclub singer Vera. It’s an intense menage that links up in blitzed London then moves to rural Wales. Beautifully shot, with a fine period feel and convincing performances. Paul Howlett

Trishna, (Michael Winterbottom, 2011), 1.20am, BBC2
Winterbottom’s India-set take on Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles stars Riz Ahmed as Jay, son of a Jaipur hotelier. While on holiday with his mates, Jay meets the beautiful, poverty-stricken Trishna (Freida Pinto) and whisks her off to a new life in Mumbai, where their excitement and dreams of Bollywood stardom begin to sour. Visually, it’s a delight, but dramatically it lacks some of the Hardy heft. Paul Howlett

Live sport

Test Cricket: South Africa v Bangladesh Coverage of the third day’s play in the first Test. 8.55am, Sky Sports Cricket

Premiership Rugby Union: Leicester Tigers v Exeter Chiefs Coverage of the match from the fifth round of fixtures. 2.30pm, BT Sport 2

Premier League Football: Chelsea v Manchester City The champions entertain Guardiola’s free-scoring City. 5pm, BT Sport 1