David Jacobs presents a new six-part series devoted to the singer who established a singular musical persona in the fifties with classic ballads like Misty and Chances Are. The series looks at a career spanning several decades and offers interviews with Mathis, Burt Bacharach, Deniece Williams and Natalie Cole.

Choice
There are two excellent and very different plays on today. The second is a one-man tour de force. Forget Alf Garnett when Warren Mitchell dons The Seven White Masks of Scaramouche Jones (9.00pm R4). This picaresque adventure spirits our hero out of a Trinidad fish-shop, across the world and through the 20th century, meeting a young Karol Wojtyla, among others, on his way.

Earlier, Island of the Day Before Yesterday (2.15pm R4) is a dramatisation of one of Jane Stevenson's utterly brilliant stories of intricate and rebounding deception. Sorry, but you really must not miss it.

Meanwhile, in the smoochy corner, David Jacobs introduces a series about Johnny Mathis (7.00pm R2), whose first hit was in 1957... that was six years after Tony Benn first answered Any Questions (8.00pm R4). He celebrates this half-century by doing it again tonight - and talks to Andrew Duncan on p8. SG