Sunday
Wallander
9pm, BBC One
It's strange to remember that when the BBC first broadcast Sweden's Wallander, back in 2008, it was basically to promote its own new English-language adaptations of Henning Mankell's character, with Kenneth Branagh as the downbeat detective. The Swedish series went on to become a cult, helping kickstart the Nordic noir TV wave, while the Branagh show began to feel a little second-hand and left behind. The two are different beasts, though: where the Swedish series consisted of original stories, BBC One's is devoted to delivering handsome, feature-length adaptations of Mankell's novels themselves, albeit in a jumbled order. This final series of three begins with an adaptation of the third Wallander book - 1998's The White Lioness, with Kurt a fish out of water as he searches for a missing Swedish woman in the sunlight of South Africa - and will end with 2011's curtain-closing The Troubled Man. For many of us, Krister Henriksson's performance will remain the definitive portrayal; but, as he proves tonight, Branagh's unheroic take on Kurt is rather lovely, and easy to watch.
Monday
Storm Troupers: The Fight To Forecast The Weather 9pm, BBC Four You might not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but that doesn't mean you should take them for granted. There was a time when the very idea that it could be possible to predict what the weather would be like in the future seemed preposterous, and you can insert your own Michael Fish jokes here. In this three-part documentary, the journalist Alok Jha charts the history of weather forecasting from its origins in the early 19th century, through the vital role it played in military strategies during both World Wars, to its place in our lives today, impacting on the world economy itself. His story begins with the figure of the Victorian admiral Robert FitzRoy - the man who invented the term "forecast" - who was driven to explore the possibilities of studying weather patterns as a way of saving lives at sea, and pioneered the use of the barometer to predict storms. Along the way come jars of leeches, and eccentric men flying balloons into clouds.
Tuesday
Rovers
10pm, Sky 1
Joe Wilkinson and David Earl, the writers behind this new sitcom, are clearly fans of Craig Cash's small, slow-burning, entirely magnificent and much-missed pub comedy, Early Doors - nothing wrong with that, of course, but sometimes Rovers tries so hard to be Early Doors you can't help noticing that it's.just not. But give it time, because once it starts to find its own groove, there's potential here. One of the chief delights is the presence of Cash himself, both as director and star of the ensemble cast. Increasingly resembling a benign Mark E Smith, he plays Pete "Meat Pot" Mott, the most hopelessly devoted fan of the hopeless Redbridge Rovers (not that there are many other fans vying for the title), a lowly club in the lower football divisions, who spends every other Saturday hanging around the clubhouse of their dilapidated grounds. Among the other regulars are Diane Morgan (aka Philomena Cunk), enjoying a special relationship with Detectorists's Pearce Quigley, and Cash's fellow Royle Family demigod, Sue Johnston, playing Doreen, who runs the bar, and the gossip.
Wednesday
Boris V Dave: The Battle For Europe
9pm, Channel 4
You sense there are few things in life that Michael Crick (the roving political correspondent of Channel 4 News, with a scarf like Rupert The Bear's) enjoys more than making a nuisance of himself and generally irritating the bejesus out of every politician in his path. Not content with his heroic and on-going investigation into fraudulent election expenses by the Conservatives during the last general election, he pops up tonight to stick his knitting needles into the big beasts of the European referendum. Crick takes the current in-out hokey cokey as an excuse to lay out the history of antagonism between Cameron and Johnson, tracing its development from their shared past at Eton, then Oxford and the Bullingdon Club, through to the top echelons of the Tories. Interviews with friends, families and foes explore the incidents that have shaped the pair's political views, and defined the increasingly public personal battle that could determine both Britain's future relationship with Europe and, please no, the leadership of the country.
Thursday
Neil Gaiman's Likely Stories
9pm, Sky Arts
Across the 1970s and early-80s, British TV revelled in anthology shows devoted to sinister and twisted little stories, but for mysterious reasons the genre fell out of favour. In recent years, though, the twin success of Black Mirror and Inside No. 9 has helped revive the long-dormant format. Confirming a trend is underway, this is a nicely creepy collection of odd tales from the much-loved writer: four half-hour stories, going out in two double bills. All the films are directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard (the pair behind the memorable Nick Cave documentary, 20,000 Days on Earth), who bring to bear a grotty style, exemplified in the first offering tonight, "Foreign Parts," about a young loner (consumed work by George MacKay) who finds himself infected with a David Cronenberg-like venereal disease, which slowly begins to take over. In a Twilight Zone nod, Gaiman himself appears as a background voice, glimpsed on TV or heard on a podcast. As a bonus, Jarvis Cocker composed the suitably spare and off-the-beat soundtrack.
Friday
Tales From The Tour Bus: Rock 'n' Roll On The Road 9pm, BBC Four A repeat for this matey documentary. You get the feeling that many of the best war stories aren't included, of course, for reasons of taste, decency and the risk of being sued or arrested. However, it's still pretty good fun. Rick Wakeman is your conductor for a trip along grotty British B-roads in battered vans, as a few fistfuls of rockers recount tales of touring the UK from the late-1950s to the 1980s: a story of third-class British Rail tickets, legendary B&Bs, fabled pubs, eternal transport cafés and the doings of the strange breed known as roadies. Contributors include Marty Wilde, Wilko Johnson, Blockhead Norman Watt Roy, Suzi Quatro, ex-Joy Division/ New Order bassist Peter Hook and members of The Shadows, The Damned, The Pretty Things, Fairport Convention, Happy Mondays, Aswad, Girlschool, and more. Followed by Totally British: 70s Rock And Roll (10pm), two hours of familiar archive from The Old Grey Whistle Test and Top Of The Pops.
Saturday
The Disappearance
9pm, BBC Four
Listen very carefully. I shall say this only once. The hot new crush for attendees of BBC Four’s Saturday Night Subtitles party, The Disappearance comes trumpeted as “France’s Answer To Broadchurch.” Broadchurch, of course, was Britain’s answer to Denmark’s The Killing. So, cutting out the patriotic middleman, you could say that The Disappearance is really France’s answer to that. Simple enough. Except that, if you read the opening titles carefully, you’ll notice that The Disappearance, which was made in 2015, is actually a remake of a Spanish series called Desaparecida that was originally broadcast in 2007, at the same time as The Killing was first being aired on Danish TV.
According to my, admittedly increasingly punchdrunk, calculations, this means The Disappearance would more accurately be billed as: “France’s version of Spain’s answer to The Killing, which they gave before Denmark had even finished asking, long before the UK came up with an answer, and before the USA piled in with remakes of The Killing and Broadchurch nobody liked.”
By this point, though, you might have forgotten what the question was in the first place. So I’ll remind you: Could it be that we’ve seen a few too many dramas regurgitating the same basic story over and over again?
The story begins with a child gone missing. In this case, it’s Lea Morel, who, on the eve of her 17th birthday, heads out for a night with friends in their hometown of Lyon, promising her mother she’ll be back before the strict 3AM curfew she’s set. (French parents, it seems, are a little more laissez faire when it comes to strict curfews.) But by the time of her birthday lunch the next afternoon, she’s still not returned.
At this point, in keeping with time-honoured tradition, the investigation is taken up by a detective no one can get the hang of, in this case Bertrand Molina (François-Xavier Demaison), newly arrived in Lyons following some bad business in Paris. As he noses into the mystery, it leads him further into the underworld; meanwhile, buried family secrets, are dragged into the light, along with networks of lies and guilt that spread through the community.
The distant ghost of Twin Peaks hangs at a height above all of these serials – you catch its shadow here as we discover the popular blonde highschool queen has a cocaine stash hidden in her bedroom, and a life her parents never suspected – though none of them have attempted its enveloping cosmic-spooky otherness, opting for a generic dramatic realism that, stuffed with coincidence, rarely feels quite real. That is, all of them present us with a surface mystery, but none are ever actually mysterious.
However, if we are condemned to endless variations of this missing-child-frantic-parents-general-guilt story (aspects of The Disappearance also strongly recall the BBC’s James Nesbitt drama The Missing), the pleasure lies in the differences in the detailing. The Disappearance assembles its storyline efficiently: familiar as it all seems, it still just about makes you want to know what happened. Really, though, it’s the setting that makes it: an unfamiliar TV landscape, Lyon simply looks nice in the background. With eight episodes showing in four double-bills, it’s a decent enough sleepy Saturday dependable for the next month. As far as the Eurodramas go, Italy’s Gomorrah (Wednesday, Sky Atlantic, 9pm) remains the only show in town at the moment. It makes nine out of 10 current dramas just look silly, no matter where they come from. And it answers to no-one.
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