The Continuing Adventures of a Boy Called Alex (Sunday, 8 p.m. on TVO) is as inspirational and heartfelt as the original documentary, last year's A Boy Called Alex. The boy is 19-year-old Alex Stobbs, a musical prodigy living with cystic fibrosis who is now studying choral music at King's College, Cambridge. It's an accomplishment that goes against the odds, considering he's also partially deaf from the dozens and dozens of drugs he's had to ingest since birth to stave off his degenerative lung disease. This sequel follows Stobbs during his first year at Cambridge, after landing a choral scholarship. In the 2008 film about his life at Eton College, Stobbs mentioned that he had always wanted to conduct Bach's St. Matthew Passion - a strenuous three-hour choral work. After watching how the young man survives from day to day (50 to 60 pills to be swallowed, physiotherapy and overnight feedings through an IV) while working so hard and so cheerfully, several professional soloists offered their services if he ever did manage to get his Passion project going. The Continuing Adventures follows his struggle to do so: the rehearsals, the schoolwork, the memorizing of the 300-page score, worried visits from his mother and the stress of juggling all this while living with a terminal disease. Stobbs is forever buoyant, even from a hospital bed and even when one of his closest friends reminds us how high the stakes are: "He's conducting real soloists, a real choir, a professional orchestra. This is a paying public, this isn't just home territory or a friendly school where everyone is going to clap." Stobbs's harshest critic, however, will always be himself.
Also airing
Alaska Most Extreme (Sunday, 8 p.m. on Discovery). An hour-long look at what it's like to live and work in the most remote state of America, or as this documentary labels it, the "most extreme."
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Arctic Roughnecks (Sunday, 9 p.m., Discovery). Ooooh. Ice, snow and really, really big trucks - it's a little (and big) boy's dream show as we watch ice roads constructed in the Arctic and we learn how fuel and freight are hauled hundreds of kilometres across those roads.