Television: Today's pick

Seesaw (9pm ITV) What happens when the 17-year-old daughter of an affluent family is kidnapped and the parents (Geraldine James and David Suchet) decide to pay the pounds 500,000 ransom without informing the police? Deborah Moggach's three-part adaptation of her own novel starts off as a rather predictable thriller and then takes a few unexpected turns. It focuses on what unfolds when the comfy middle classes are suddenly bankrupted and scuzzy low-lifes just as suddenly hit the mint (hence the title). James, in particular, and Suchet are their usual class acts - although Amanda Ooms, as the micro mini-skirt-wearing, gun-toting kidnapper, seems to belong more to the imagination (while, ironically, leaving little to the imagination). The brooding music score is by Carl Davis, he of World at War fame.

Shifting Times (8pm BBC2) More than two-thirds of all mothers currently work - but according to this latest programme in the "Having It All" season, half of all mothers worked during the so-called stay-at-home Fifties (while a third were at work at the turn of the century). Whatever you make of those statistics, Lucy Jago's film hears from three generations of working mothers from the same Manchester family.