Tuesday's best TV- Manchester: The Night of the Bomb, BBC2

It seems, at first, a little disappointing that Ariana Grande doesn’t appear in this moving documentary about the suicide bomb attack at the Manchester Arena a year ago.

Twenty-two people died at the end of one of the singer’s concerts, and her presence at the memorial concert was a powerful symbol of the city’s refusal to be cowed by terrorism.

Grande recently told TIME magazine that the bombing represented “the absolute worst of humanity”.

She said: “You think with time it’ll become easier to talk about. Or you’ll make peace with it. But every day I wait for that peace to come and it’s still very painful.”

On reflection, the star’s absence doesn’t detract from the film.

The bombing, as far as we know, wasn’t targeted against Grande herself but was an attack on a young crowd, largely female, whose only crime was the fact that they wanted to enjoy themselves and had the freedom to do so.

Even that may be to ascribe too much logic to the motives of Salman Abedi, the 22-year-old Manchester boy of Libyan parentage who blew himself up in the foyer.

The film is made by Jamie Roberts, who previously made The Jihadis Next Door, exploring Islamic fundamentalism. Mostly, he keeps it simple. Those who were there on the night give their account, and glimpses of the evening’s passage from teenage euphoria to hellish nightmare are captured in smartphone videos.

The testimonies of the girls and their parents are heartbreaking. There are some small ironies. The projection of the phrase “Not asking for it” on the stage before Grande appears is one.

The arrival of the horror is delayed by the story of the bomber’s movements in the days leading up to the attack. He buys a rucksack, some nuts and bolts, and makes a bomb using an explosive nicknamed “mother of Satan”. It is an unstable material — he would have needed some help. He is on CCTV, buying a snack in a Spar. He stays in a flat near the city centre so his journey to the arena is short. In retrospect, he can be seen circling the venue.

If we scroll forward to the aftermath, it’s notable that MI5 had two pieces of intelligence about Abedi. This information remains secret. But the view now is that he should have been stopped when he arrived home from a visit to Libya, where his fundamentalist family live. Also notable is the statistic that out of 20,000 possible candidates for terrorist surveillance, Abedi was one of a handful deemed worthy of further study, and a meeting to discuss his activities was scheduled to take place nine days after he exploded himself.

The urge to find someone to blame is understandable, and the person to blame is Abedi. But beyond that, there are questions about how prepared we are for such man-made disasters.

Paramedics arrived on the scene after 12 minutes, but as the foyer was declared a “hot zone” they were unable to enter it.

Casualties were carried out on advertising hoardings and crash barriers taken 60 metres to the entrance to the neighbouring train station. T-shirts were used as bandages.

The fire service arrived two hours and six minutes after the blast. They did not take part in the film. Neither did the police. No doubt they have their reasons. If so, we should hear them.

Pick of the day

Bulletproof - Sky One, 9pm

Nick Love’s cop action drama picks up the pace with Pike (Ashley Walters) and Bish (Noel Clarke) stumbling into an armed robbery.

It seems to be a rule of the Lethal Weapon-inspired show that the moments of amiable banter — Walters and Clarke are very good at banter — are invariably cut short by a sudden outbreak of fast-paced action. So, a routine surveillance of a car turns into a stick-up, a shoot-out, and then a mystery, when video footage of the robbery shows that the man the cops assumed was the ringleader — a blunt criminal called Sharp (Doug Allen) — is not involved in the pillaging of the safety deposit boxes.

So what was he doing? And why does he make such efforts to slip away unnoticed from the scene of the crime?

The investigation involves a shoot-out with some fake sheikhs and a showdown in the woods, which doesn’t go the way Pike and Bish anticipated.

The action scenes have the intensity of a video game, but the show hangs together on the chemistry of the two leads, ably shepherded by Lindsey Coulson as their Pot Noodle-eating boss Sarah Tanner.

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The Split - BBC1, 9pm

As it nears its conclusion, Abi Morgan and Louise Ironside’s drama about a family of high-kicking yet refreshingly human female divorce lawyers has settled into its groove. It’s no longer about the cases they are fighting but the soapy dramas of the three sisters’ lives. None of them have their problems to seek but the most urgent issues are facing Hannah (Nicola Walker), who is dealing with the news that her husband, Nathan (Stephen Mangan), is on the leaked list of men who logged on to an extra-marital dating website.

Nathan says he didn’t do anything but the revelation causes Hannah to consider her relationship, while not being quite forceful enough in fending off the attentions of Christie, the continental smoothie.

Food Junkies - London Live, 8pm

No matter how warm the temperature, no matter that we’re edging tentatively towards what is technically known as summer, it is never too hot to have pie and mash.

Three of the best pie-and-mash gaffs are reviewed this evening, and thankfully none of them are serving the dish as some kind of a hot milkshake to appease hipster fads.

A Royal Scandal - London Live, 10pm

There are marriages where the betrothed, sadly, end up living apart — rarer are those unions where the couple almost start in separate beds and diverge like estranged tectonic plates from there.

A gold standard in loveless relationships was the political union between George IV and Duchess Caroline of Brunswick, portrayed by Richard E Grant and Susan Lynch in this catty docudrama.

When they first met, George immediately requested a brandy after his first seconds with his future wife; on his wedding day he turned up drunk and ended up passing out on the floor of their bedroom later that night. George might have detested her but the public didn’t, proving to be more popular than the future king.

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Manchester Bomb: Our Story - BBC iPlayer

A more intimate view of the Manchester bombing can be found in this BBC3 documentary, which follows a number of the girls who survived the attack, exploring the lasting psychological impact. It was the first concert Amelia, 18, had been to without her mum, and she was standing six feet away from the bomber. Her mother now struggles to let her out of her sight.

David Bowie and the Story of Ziggy Stardust - BBC iPlayer

Another chance to see this 2012 documentary about Bowie’s most extravagant creation. Jarvis Cocker narrates the story of the “strange alien creature” first sighted when

Bowie sang Starman on Top of the Pops, introducing a character “with laser-guided melodies and lyrics from another dimension”. Bowie put it best, calling Ziggy “a cross between Nijinsky and Woolworths”.