The Audience (C4, 9pm)

The Corrie Years (ITV1, 8.30pm)

Stephen Hawking’s Grand Designs (Discovery Channel, 9pm)

PROBLEMS. They rear their ugly heads on an almost daily basis, and we have to find a way to deal with them as best we can. It isn’t always easy though. Sometimes it would be nice to be able to bounce ideas off somebody else to help us make a decision, or even have somebody to actually tell us what to do if we’re that stuck.

Our lives might be so much easier if we had our own personal agony aunt on-call 24 hours a day, advising us at every important crossroad. Apparently, the leading lights at C4 thought as much, and so they’ve arranged it for a select few lost souls.

But they can go one better than offering up just one agony aunt – they’ve pulled together 50.

In the intriguing three-part series The Audience, people with genuine dilemmas turn to The Audience, a group of 50 ordinary men and women from different backgrounds and of different ages, for help.

Their issues may be whether or not to leave their job, move house, end a relationship or deal with a troublesome teen.

After hearing the dilemma, this group of people follow their subject for one week, and must deliver an agreed verdict on the path the individual should take.

The series was given the green light by David Glover, C4’s senior specialist factual commissioning editor and made by production company The Garden, which also made the award-winning 24 Hours in A&E and Seven Dwarves.

Oddly, the format has been on Glover’s mind for years. “Sometimes I used to daydream about what life would be like if one were constantly being followed around by an audience,” he explains.

“The Garden suggested we do it for real, like a golf crowd follows golfers.

This series has huge potential and we are now waiting to see how the ‘wisdom of the crowd' unfolds.” The issues raised here could either ruin or make somebody’s future – and although it will be wonderful if everything works out well, you wonder what might happen if things go horribly wrong.

The first edition introduces us to 47-year-old Ian Wainwright, who is struggling to decide whether he should continue running the family dairy farm for his ageing uncles or put himself first and start a new life somewhere else.

THERE’S a good chance that had there been peace and harmony on Tony Warren’s world-famous cobbles, Coronation Street would have died a death in the 1960s.

The life-blood which keeps the show vibrant is the seemingly endless feuds between its residents, and one of the greatest was the clash between Ken Barlow and Mike Baldwin. The former had been in the show since that first episode in 1960, but when Cockney Lothario Mike joined the show in 1976, Barlow’s position as resident ladies’ magnet was soon threatened.

Their mutual love for bespectacled temptress Deirdre led to a fierce war and an affair which split the Barlows up and convinced tabloid editors in the 1980s that soap stories sold papers.

In this week’s The Corrie Years, narrator Katherine Kelly reflects on Barlow and Baldwin’s bitter rivalry, and also recalls the enmity between drippy Derek Wilton and his neighbour, Des Barnes.

Among the contributors are William Roache (Ken), Helen Worth (Gail) and Vicky Entwistle (Janice).

CONTRARY to what the title suggests, Stephen Hawking’s Grand Designs does not see the world famous boffin attempt to build his dream house. Instead, he’s more concerned with the building blocks of the universe as he explores the underlying principles of the cosmos.

In the first of a three-part series Hawking examines why it exists and the reasons for it following rules and laws, taking in scientific history from the discovery of gravity to the development of string theory.

In a year which has seen the Large Hadron Collider generate incredible results, and the Mars rover Curiosity beam back stunning images from the red planet, the scheduling for this fact-based Big Bang Theory could not come at a better time