Sunday

Line Of Duty

9pm, BBC One

Returning for a fourth series, Line Of Duty arrives with a bang. Within the first four minutes, before the opening credits have even finished, there has been an assault, an abduction, a car screaming through the city night, a dragnet search of a shadowy estate, a hunt with baying dogs, and a ball of fire exploding, gently underlining the final credit that reads: “Directed by Jed Mercurio,” lest you miss that the writer behind the corrupt cops show has now also stepped behind the camera.

As setting out your stall goes, it’s effective. Mercurio crams 50 times more interesting action into his first 240 seconds than the entire final series of The Fall managed in what felt like six-and-a-half years. Line Of Duty hasn’t been shy about starting fast and loud before, but there is perhaps new urgency about making a mark here. Not only is it Mercurio’s first time directing the programme, it is also, after three series on BBC Two, the drama’s BBC One debut, showcased in the holy-of-holies Sunday-night slot.

Exhilarating as the opening is, though, it’s a relief to see the pace settle soon after. The last series went out in a blaze of Hollywood-style action, all automatic gunfire and high-speed getaways, but such big, dumb, high-octane business isn’t what Line Of Duty is about. This is a thriller that is at its most heart-stopping in interview scenes: simple, yet intense encounters as characters confront each other across a tabletop, attempting to get at the truth, or keep it hidden, in conversations like judo matches.

As ever, our not-quite-heroes are the chippy members of AC-12, a police anti-corruption unit tasked with investigating fellow officers, and largely despised because of it: Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), Steve Arnott (Martin Compston), and Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar). The consequences of previous investigations still linger, and account for some tensions, but we join them as they begin nosing into a brand new case.

That opening sequence depicts the culmination of a high-profile operation dubbed “Trapdoor,” led by DCI Roz Huntley (Thandie Newton). Two women have already been abducted and murdered by a balaclava-clad beast, and when reports come that another woman has been snatched, her team flies into action. A man is found, arrested and charged, and corks pop in the incident room celebrating a job well done.

But there’s a problem. A nagging forensics coordinator, Tim Ifield (Jason Watkins), claims to have spotted discrepancies with the evidence that cast doubt on the suspect’s guilt – but nobody wants to hear it. Are they trying to cover something? Could the pressure on Roz to catch a killer have caused her to cut corners?

Line Of Duty would be nothing without its core players, but the guest stars are always vital, and, as Roz, it’s a joy to see Newton given far more to do than her Westworld robot. Watchful, careful, tired, you can see calculations running behind her eyes, even if you can’t tell what she’s thinking. Meanwhile Watkins displays his gift for being a prissy little annoyance one second, deeply sinister the next.

As he gets into it, Mercurio revels in details of forensics and procedure. But it’s his almost helpless taste for pulp that gives Line Of Duty its peculiar vibe, the way he balances (or fails to) realism with crazy Penny Dreadful stuff. So, after a long, tense, quiet stretch, the episode ends by going fruit-loopy again, with the kind of cliffhanger not seen since villains were tying damsels to railway tracks. It’s preposterous, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Monday

Harlots

10pm, ITV Encore

This eight-part drama charts a feud between rival brothels in 18th century London, where, an opening statistic tells us, one in five women earned her living as a prostitute. But don’t expect a grim exploration of the realities of the Georgian sex trade. A wiggy explosion of bustles, beauty spots, bosoms and bare bums jiggling to an anachronistic rock soundtrack, it’s quite daft. Where dramas like Deadwood, The Knick and, to a lesser degree, Peaky Blinders made the past strange, vivid and dangerous, the most dangerous thing that might happen here is the sudden outbreak of an Adam Ant video. Yet it’s worth seeing, thanks to the two great actresses playing the competing madams.

Samantha Morton stars as earth mother Margaret Wells, who runs her house of girls (including her daughters) in a poor part of town, but is hoping to move up by opening a gleaming new place in ritzy Soho. Out to stop her is her snooty, nasty nemesis, Lydia Quiqley (Lesley Manville), owner of Soho’s most fashionably fragrant upper-class bordello.

Tuesday

Inside No 9

10pm, BBC Two

The third series of Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s twisty anthology show ended last week, but, as a bonus, here’s a repeat for the Series 2 episode “The 12 Days Of Christine,” one of the greatest things they’ve done. To say too much would spoil things for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but it’s safe to state some facts. The setting is, mostly, Flat 9 in a humdrum high-rise, where we find Christine, an ordinary young woman, played quite extraordinarily by Sheridan Smith. Directed by series regular Guillem Morales, there are jokes, but they are mostly the passing jokes people share in real life, and it’s not really a comedy. If there is a bleak, black humour working here, it’s of the rarest sort, the kind filled with sympathy and tenderness. There are ghostly jumps, but it’s not really a horror story, either. Except maybe it is. The first time I saw it, it knocked me sideways, anyway, in ways I wasn’t expecting. I couldn’t get it out of my head for days.

Wednesday

Brian Pern: A Tribute

10pm, BBC Four

I’ve never really found Simon Day’s vaguely Peter Gabriel-ish spoof rock elder statesman all that funny, or the music industry observations particularly sharp or convincing – but loads of people love the bones of it. If you are a fan, you will have been left bereft by the announcement of Pern’s sudden death earlier this year (a brave gag, or one in debatable taste, given how many real music industry figures died recently). But there’s maybe some consolation in this fond farewell film, featuring Pern’s last sage interview, stories from behind the scenes on his final album, and news on the plans for a tribute concert at the Royal Albert Hall being organised by the surviving members of his band, Thotch. Contributors include former colleagues, ex-wives and fans, among them Peter Gabriel himself, Phil Collins, Peter Davison (recalling Pern’s disastrous guest role on 1980s Dr Who) and, er, Gavin Esler. It’s followed by Brian Pern At The BBC (10.40pm), a parody of the archive compilations BBC Four usually chucks together on a quiet Friday night.

Thursday

The Legacy

9pm, Sky Arts

Returning for a third and final series, this excellent Danish family saga has never set tongues chattering like the biggest Scandinavian hits – partly because it’s tucked behind the paywall; but perhaps also because it’s not yet another nouveau-noir about moody sleuths hunting sadistic and implausibly creative serial killers. And it’s all the more surprising and engrossing for it. The Legacy began with a famous artist’s death, and has since traced the fall-outs, simmering resentment and stubborn love between her adult children: she died leaving her will, particularly ownership of her grand, crumbling house, unresolved; not only that, she had another child nobody knew about. The last series ended with more death, breakdown and divorce, but, as we return three years later, things seem happier. Elder sister Gro (the terrific Trine Dyrholm), a player in the arts world, is proudly watching the family’s creative streak reach a new generation, overseeing her niece Hannah’s debut exhibition. Then comes the unexpected return of Hannah’s father, Gro’s brother Frederik, whose time away hasn’t made him any less uptight.

Friday

Decline And Fall

9pm, BBC One

It feels a little more Sunday teatime than Friday night, but this three-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel of 1928 is splendid nonsense, hitting much the same note as the BBC’s dotty remake of Mapp & Lucia a couple of years ago. Jack Whitehall is surprisingly effective as hapless hero Paul Pennyfeather, a quiet and serious young Oxford Student, who finds his dreams of the priesthood shattered when a run-in with the toff thugs of the University’s Bollinger Club sees him unfairly expelled. He winds up as a teacher at a hopeless public school in the wilds of Wales, where the staff have either taken refuge in booze, or gone mad. A lively cast of grotesques assembles, including David Suchet as the grand headmaster, Stephen Graham as the unsettling ex-con butler Philbrick, Vincent Franklin as the bewigged teacher Prendy, and Douglas Hodge as his dissolute colleague Captain Grimes. Regular Inside No 9 director Guillem Morales films it in a style that’s half saucy postcard, half Addams Family cartoon.

Saturday

Jimi: All Is By My Side

9.45pm, BBC Two

To celebrate April Fools Day, all the channels have got together to throw us a slap-up traditional Saturday TV feast – apart from the Dad’s Army repeat (8.30pm, BBC Two) there isn’t a single programme worth watching. There is, though, the premiere of this 2013 movie, an understated, intimate, strangely ambling biopic of Jimi Hendrix, focussing on the years just before he exploded. Set in the swinging/ racist London of 1966-67, André Benjamin (aka Outkast’s André 3000) is great as Hendrix, capturing his style and physicality while underpinning it with a wry, intelligent take on the dude. Imogen Poots co-stars as Linda Keith, the English socialite who persuades him to come to Britain, and Hayley Atwell plays Katy Etchingham, the music-fan hairdresser who becomes his girlfriend. The script has Hendrix beating Etchingham, something the real woman has strenuously complained never happened – questions over that, and the lack of any Hendrix music (permission was denied) damage things somewhat, but it remains an intriguing, if inconsequential sketch.

LAST WEEK…

Attacked on all fronts, SS-GB (BBC One) limped to its conclusion last Sunday, with a bit of a dash, dammit. I’d never claim it as a classic for the ages that will return to haunt our dreams decades from now, but the more people piled on to give it a kicking, the more things I found to like about this adaptation of Len Deighton’s alternative history novel of Nazis in Britain.

Certainly, SS-GB was not one of the screen’s great resistance stories. For one of those, track down French director (and former resistance member) Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterly 1969 movie Army Of Shadows, a terse and devastating film with a sense for storytelling, style and action sharp enough to slice your throat, a surface toughness pulled like a mask over despair so profound you can practically touch it.

Describing an invasion that never happened, Deighton’s story was never going to have that kind of atmosphere, or tried to, and the TV version softened the edges, keen to play up smoky 1940s pseudo-noir romance, a little clumsily, like kids playing dress-up. And yet, for a BBC One Sunday night period piece, this thing was absolutely crawling with mad ideas and imagery, from the dandy hero’s obsession with Big Bill Broonzy’s “Keys To The Highway”, to the scenes of Nazis exhuming Karl Marx’s coffin and the excellent late farmyard battle with a drugged-up king expiring in the back of the car.

Deighton’s weird history-gone-wrong detective story provided a strong old-school undercarriage and SS-GB was at its weakest when it deviated from the source, a problem exacerbated by the makers making sure they left doors open for a possible sequel, despite the fact Deighton never wrote one.

The sour reaction to the programme probably means that hoped-for second series won’t happen now, which, even though I liked it, is perhaps a blessing. The BBC is ploughing on with plans for a sequel to The Night Manager, even though John Le Carré wrote it as a one-off, and it’s depressing to imagine the kind of fudge they might come up with simply as an excuse for more photographs of Tom Hiddleston wearing a suit somewhere sunny.

That said, as a Le Carré fan, I’d rather see a Night Manager sequel than the other Le Carré project the BBC has underway, remaking The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. We are blessed to live in a universe in which the overwhelming Richard Burton movie exists. We need no other.

Rather than that, or a second SS-GB, maybe the BBC could throw some money at trying to persuade Len Deighton to allow BBC Four to repeat Game, Set & Match, the excellent 13-part adaptation of his twisting 1980s Cold War trilogy ITV made in 1988. Deighton hated it, and withdrew rights for anyone to ever show it again. But, shot on location in London, Mexico and a Berlin where the Wall still stood, resonating with the authentic 80s atmosphere that’s all the rage today, and boasting a superb performance by Ian Holm as the truculent, sweating, unglamorous spy hero, it’s a case worth reinvestigating.