WEDNESDAY

24: Legacy

9pm, Fox

It’s exactly noon – clunk-dunk-clunk-dunk ticks the perpetual digital clock – and members of a terrorist cell with Middle Eastern accents have invaded an ordinary house in Washington DC. (In all the excitement, I didn’t catch these characters’ names, but the credits helpfully list them as Jihadi #1, Jihadi #2 and Jihadi #3.) They’re here to torture the occupants to death. Mom lies dead by the fridge. Dad takes a bullet in the head at the kitchen table. Then it’s off in the Jihadi Mystery Machine to visit another unsuspecting household. A bad dude’s work is never done.

Welcome back to the wonderful world of 24, where things have changed, but not much. The main difference is that our traditional indestructible protagonist, Jack Bauer/Kiefer Sutherland, is nowhere in sight. In his place comes Eric Carter (Corey Hawkins), an ex-Army Ranger who thankfully shares Jack’s ability to run, shoot, wear a man bag and speak flawless Exposition all at once. Sadly, yet crucially, he also shares the same cursed luck that leaves him instantly unable to trust anyone and having to go rogue and hunt bad dudes alone, while various ineffectual American intelligence agencies come after him.

Carter’s house is next on the hit list. He was part of a team who eliminated fabled terrorist leader, Sheik Essentially Osama Bin Laden. Now, possibly aided by someone inside the US counter terrorist establishment, Jihadi #1 and his bad dudes are after them, partly for revenge, but mostly to recover a flash drive containing a huge list of terrorist sleepers all across America, just waiting to be activated.

This series was in production long before President Trump happened, but the reflexive fallback on generic radical Islamist bad dudes leaves a more bitter taste than ever. 24’s eternal curse is how, when it appeared in 2001, it was blindsided by 9/11, and, concussed, developed a deluded sense of relevancy. Thus, a show both popcorn at heart and in the head went blundering grim-faced and stuffed with Imodium into debates on the Bush administration’s taste for “enhanced interrogation” – an area we can only hope it has learned to shy away from now Team Torture Works is watching from the Whitehouse. 24’s most interesting aspect, however, is how crazily conflicted it gets. The same fascinating paranoid conservative pulp mess remains. Just when the show is painting every Muslim in sight as a bad dude, it offers a token who isn’t … then winks, well, maybe she is. Just when you’re thinking it’s encouraging that the series now has a black hero, it introduces his brother who, of course, is a drug dealing ganglord. Just when you’re thinking, at least we’ll never have to see Jack’s daughter again, they roll out another teenage character designed to annoy everyone.

Yet 24 remains astonishingly easy to watch. The “real time” structure might be creaking, but it still delivers cliffhangers roughly every six minutes. And the news that veteran 24 man Tony Almeida will be returning is enough to keep us hanging on. Now, there’s a bad dude.

SUNDAY

The Big Painting Challenge

6pm, BBC One

As the planet waits to see what Bake Off will look like once Channel 4 gets its hands on it, the BBC is throwing out the cosy copy cat shows thick and fast. The mucky-fingered maestros of The Great Pottery Throw Down (Thursday, 8pm, BBC Two) haven’t even reached midway point of their exciting competition yet, but already here’s another bunch of nice ordinary folk with various regional accents making nice things slowly, while nice judges and nice presenters wish them well. Some things have changed since the first series in 2015 – original hosts Una Stubbs and Richard Bacon have transformed into Mariella Frostrup and the Reverend Richard Coles, who both seem delighted to be here – and there are more intensive tips from mentors. But, essentially, it remains a competition to discover the best amateur painter in Britain who wanted to go on a TV show. Today’s challenges include a very sad-looking teddy bear. Lachlan Goudie, Daphne Todd and David Dibosa judge the results.

MONDAY

Girls

10pm, Sky Atlantic

Beloved of many (and equally reviled by quite a few), Lena Dunham’s comedy of self-absorbed millennial life and strife for four young women trying to navigate New York begins its sixth and final series tonight. When it started, Girls was hailed as the anti-Sex And The City, and, in terms of style and downbeat, caustic attitude, the obvious comparisons are shows like Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. At heart, though, the thing that made Girls stand out was the same elusive, eternal, element that made something like The Likely Lads or The Office hit home – an audience suddenly experiencing the rare sensation of seeing characters on the screen who were actually quite like them. If it hasn’t stayed as fresh as it was in 2012, well, who has? As we pick up, Hannah (Dunham), is continuing with her plan to resume her tortured writing career, taking a commission from a magazine to do a piece on an exclusive women’s surf camp, despite “hating and maybe being allergic to sand.”

TUESDAY

Andrew Marr: My Brain And Me

9pm, BBC Two

“Making yourself the story” is usually to be avoided, but it’s a task Mr Marr throws himself into unabashedly with this film on his own severe stroke of 2013. The attack was life threatening, but, undergoing intense therapy to restore his speech, Marr was back at work as a broadcaster surprisingly swiftly. However, the stroke has left him with lack of movement in his left hand, arm and leg, and it’s clear he sees his recovery as a stalled, sometimes frustrating work in progress. Director Liz Allen follows him over the course of a year as he works hard, goes through his physical therapy sessions, and meets other stroke survivors who have been left affected in different and sometimes surprising ways. Meanwhile, Marr talks with the doctors who are picking clues from their conditions in the hope of gaining more understanding of how the brain works, and travels to the USA to undergo a new cutting-edge treatment, to see whether it will help improve movement on his left side.

THURSDAY

Storyville: Notes On Blindness

9pm, BBC Four

If I could recommend just one thing this week, it would be this deeply moving documentary by Peter Middleton and James Spinney. The film is built around the work of theology professor John Hull, who became completely blind in the early 1980s. As his sight began to fade, Hull documented the experience on audiocassette: an aural diary preserving not only his thoughts, but conversations with his wife, Marilyn, and their children. The filmmakers use those tapes as soundtrack, employing actors (Dan Renton Skinner and Simone Kirby as Hull and Marilyn) to lip-synch to Hull’s recordings, an impressionistic, immersive style. Seeking to understand blindness’s “meaning,” as Hull contemplates how his memory of his wife’s face is slipping away from him, while his dreams grow more intense, it becomes a study of being human, and a love story. For visually impaired viewers, enhanced options are available via the Red Button or iPlayer; for more information visit www.bbc.co.uk/storyville.

FRIDAY

The Team

9pm, More4

The latest continental import to arrive under the Walter Presents banner, this crime series feels like an emergency aid package for anyone feeling the Brexit pain. Jumping from Belgium to Denmark to Germany (with a little Switzerland on the side), it delivers a whole lot of Europe in once concentrated dose. So, even if it’s fairly meat-and-potatoes stuff in terms of plot, characterisation and style, there are lots of interesting locations, both gorgeous and grimy. Scandi-fans will be pleased to see Killing/ Borgen’s Lars Mikkelsen heading the international team of detectives gathered by Europol to investigate the murders of three prostitutes, each killed in a separate country by what seems to be the same killer. As the connection between victims becomes clear, links emerge with older crimes, and of some bigger, darker, twistier plot beneath the surface. It’s no classic, but it’s watchable, with Mikkelsen as charismatic as ever. Respect is due to the subtitlers, who have to deal with about six different languages.

SATURDAY

Taboo

9.15pm, BBC One

It’s the penultimate episode of Tom Hardy’s big chunk of fruit and nut and, even if you don’t consider it a classic for all time, you have to admire the cut of its sheer mad jib. With Hardy, Stephen Graham, Mark Gatiss, Tom Hollander, David Hayman and Jonathan Pryce all going at once, Saturday nights haven’t been this odd on BBC One since Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer persuaded them to let them make Families At War. Hardy’s Delaney has come to admit that being a pariah businessman in Regency London, with both the Crown and the East India Company as his enemies, is an unenviable fate. Having lost just about everything, he discovers there’s still more to lose when he suffers a devastating betrayal, one that places his very freedom in jeopardy. Armed with the opportunity they have been waiting for, his circling enemies conspire to take him down for good. Meanwhile, Lorna Bow sets out to discover the truth, as Zilpha comes to realise she has perhaps already found her own.

LAST WEEK'S HIGHLIGHTS

TIME speeds up as you get older, and the same holds true for television. Certainly, if you consider the issue of TV dramas based on some of the most controversial crimes lurking in the public consciousness, you can see evidence of acceleration, as the gap between events and their restaging steadily shrinks. After a long period during which it was considered taboo, the first TV series on the Moors Murderers, the exceptional See No Evil, came in 2006, four decades after the killings. Appropriate Adult, a compelling account of Fred and Rosemary West, arrived in 2006, a dozen years after the arrests. And last week came The Moorside (BBC One), based on the 2008 disappearance of the then nine-year-old Shannon Matthews, nine years since news first broke that a little girl had gone missing from the Moorside estate in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. The drama hasn’t generated quite as many headlines as the real story did, but it has stirred its own controversy. There have been newspaper stories about how the estranged family of Shannon’s mother – Karen Matthews, who was complicit in her daughter’s kidnapping – feel outraged no-one consulted them about the production. There was the interview on This Morning with Julie Bushby and Natalie Murray, neighbours of Matthews at the time, whose perspective lies at the heart of the drama, in which frowning hosts Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby wondered repeatedly whether “the community” would rather the programme hadn’t been made. “I don’t think anybody’s bothered,” answered Bushby, who organised local efforts to search for Shannon, and whose forthright nature is brilliantly captured by Sheridan Smith in the series. And there have been think pieces holding up The Moorside as part of Britain’s addiction to the poverty porn of cheap pseudo-documentaries with “Benefits” in the title.

At the root of this supposed concern lies a snobbishness about TV. If The Moorside’s writer, Neil McKay, had published a 500-page hardback, it’s doubtful anyone would be exercised over whether books are capable of handling such matters. To accuse him of boarding a poverty porn bandwagon is to ignore his previous work, as writer of See No Evil, Appropriate Adult, and other fact-based dramas including This Is Personal, about the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.

McKay works to elevate such cases from the level of the true-crime tales that are a staple of American TV. He scrapes off the grubby jokes and political capital, and lays them in the light, calmly, but with compassion. He asks us to consider these crimes via their effects on people who knew the victims, on the investigators, and on wider society. With The Moorside, he again avoids sensationalism, yet not at the expense of searing, probing drama. The question of whether it is “too soon” for TV like this is valid. But when would be too late?