Sunday
Line Of Duty
9pm, BBC One
As we reach midway point in this series of Jed Mercurio’s paranoid cop thriller, things settle down into a tense, quiet simmer… well, for a while, at least. Mostly, tonight’s episode plays like a combination of cat-and-mouse and chess match. Arnott (Martin Compston), increasingly determined to put the screws to Roz Huntley (Thandie Newton), begins piling on the pressure, pulling in all available evidence and setting his team to going over it in microscopic detail. He’s particularly keen to pin down her movements the night Tim Ifield was killed, resulting in a meeting with her flustered lawyer husband, Nick (Lee Ingleby). Simultaneously, Huntley seeks to cover her moves by planning ahead, throwing suspicion in other, unexpected directions. Meanwhile, Kate (Vicky McClure) is caught in the crossfire, as a new witness comes forward with testimony that seems to suggest Roz arrested the right man for the Balaclava Man murders in the first place. It’s an engrossing episode, leading to another fine example of Mercurio’s love for a crazed cliffhanger.
Monday
Prison Break
9pm, Fox
Many have vied for the knucklehead crown, but Prison Break still holds the title as the most ridiculously stupid, yet dumbly watchable TV series ever made. After four series of increasingly insane/tortuous twists, hard stares, short haircuts and grunted dialogue apparently written by fevered 12-year-olds, you might have thought it was finally all over in 2009, when, unable to think of anything else to do, our intricately tattooed genius hero, Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller), just keeled over and died. Fooled you! Seven years later, turns out Michael is alive, and, you guessed, incarcerated in another one of those maximum security hell prisons he likes so much. In a dubiously timely touch, this one’s in Yemen, but don’t expect too much thought-provoking musing on the troubles of the world. Chief among the many returning characters is his ruminative brother Lincoln (Dominic Purcell), who, after receiving a few cryptic clues, is off to Yemen to bust him loose. Vitally, magnificent southern sleaze T-Bag (Robert Knepper) is also back, this time with a bionic hand.
Tuesday
Peter Kay’s Car Share
9pm, BBC One
A welcome return for the small but perfectly formed sitcom that’s the best thing Peter Kay has been involved in since Phoenix Nights, and maybe even better than that. Following the driving to and from work adventures of supermarket colleagues John (Kay) and Kayleigh (the marvellous Sian Gibson), when Car Share arrived in 2015, it seemed smart and pleasant enough. By the end, when the chemistry of the inevitable will-they-won’t-they between the heroes was overpowering, it had proved itself the sweetest-funniest thing we’ve seen on TV in an age. That first series ended, though, with disaster: Kayleigh had moved across town to her sister’s, meaning John no longer had an excuse to give her a lift. Has the budding romance been nipped in the bud? We catch up with them two days later, as they’re both making their ways to work alone… but there’s always the phone. It’s a brilliantly constructed little half hour. Even better, the full four-part series is available on iPlayer immediately afterwards. Episode two is a riot.
Wednesday
The Knowledge: The World’s Toughest Taxi Test
9pm, Channel 4
Forget your Uber, never mind your Google Maps, and a pox on your satnav – such things compare with a proper cabbie the way a Snapchat filter compares with a Rembrandt. This excellent little documentary just barely touches the edges of The Knowledge, the legendary test that requires London’s black-cab drivers to memorise the city’s 25,000 streets and thousands of places of interest, and so be able to come up with a route to a meet passenger’s needs immediately on request, or change it en route in response to conditions on the road. Candidates hoping to pass the trial-by-street can spend years studying for it (gaining The Knowledge is reckoned to be the equivalent to attaining a degree in law or medicine), and 70 per cent of hopefuls drop out. This film follows several recent candidates – including a Kosovan immigrant, a bus driver and a single mother – as they attempt to take in all the information the task demands, and then face the final one-on-one exam.
Thursday
Guerrilla
9pm, Sky Atlantic
Written and directed by John Ridley, screenwriter of 12 Years A Slave, this six-part political drama about a Black Power movement in 1970s Britain gets off to a tough, intriguing start. It’s 1971 and, with the headlines filled with Baader-Meinhof and the IRA, Jas (Frieda Pinto) and Marcus (Babou Ceesay), members of a civil rights group in London, are pushed into taking radical steps of their own. The everyday racism they face from police is bad enough; but when they are affected by the violent work of a secret Special Branch unit devoted to infiltrating and quashing activism, they decide the time for talking is over, and direct, bloody action is required. The story is a fiction, but this “black power desk” at Scotland Yard was very real, and Ridley explores the subject in tense and sadly timely style: a scene depicting a stand-off at a National Front march is stunning. Idris Elba co-stars as a friend of Jas’s who’d rather not get involved, at first; and Rory Kinnear is unsettling as a cop imported from Rhodesia to deal with “radicals.”
Friday
Spin
9pm, More4
With the first round of France’s presidential elections imminent, it’s a good time for the return of this satisfying French political drama, a series that’s a little bit Borgen, a little bit West Wing, but has a classy Gallic hustle of its own, and a cheeky line in holding up a distorting mirror to current events around the Élysée Palace. Originally broadcast in France last November, this third and apparently final series tapped concerns that were then prevalent in the country: as the show’s fictional election approaches, the far-right party is racing ahead in the opinion polls. (In reality, today, French opinion polls predict that Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National will ultimately be trounced… but polls have been wrong before.) But everything changes when the country is rocked by a brutal political assassination. Meanwhile, the outgoing president is hobbled by stories about his private life. As if. The real battle, of course, is not between the candidates, but their shadowy spin-doctors, well-groomed ex-friends-turned-bitter rivals Simon Kapita (Bruno Wolkowitch) and Ludovic Desmeuze (former Spiral guy Grégory Fitoussi).
LAST WEEK'S HIGHLIGHTS
Late in the day, I finally caught Eyewitness, the Norwegian series that’s among the latest arrivals on Channel 4’s online World TV boutique, Walter Presents. As often happens when I try catching up with anything on Walter Presents, though, I made it to roughly 13 minutes in, before resolving to come back later, knowing that, in all likelihood, “later” would never come.
This wasn’t anything to do with Eyewitness itself, particularly, although if it was less run-of-the-mill I might have stuck around. We open in traditional Scandi-noir territory, deep in the woods by night, where two teenage boys, Philip and Henning, are flitting through trees on motorbikes. The scramble, however, is just the pretext for being out there alone; the pair feel an unspoken attraction, and soon fall into a fumbling, snogging embrace, a development that leaves both confused and, Henning in particular, guilty, denying he’s gay.
Their tryst is short-lived, though, because, in the Nordic way, it’s interrupted by multiple homicide. The boys escape, swearing silence. But they have left clues to their presence. And there’s the little fact that Philip’s foster mother is the cop investigating the killings. It’s efficient enough, and the way crime is used as wrapping to bundle in themes of sexuality and issues involved in fostering is very Scandinavian. What caused me to give up, though, was the arrival of Trevor McDonald, begging me to go to Vision Express.
A self-destructive side effect of the rise of on-demand TV is that it has weaned us off advertising, the stuff that, BBC licence fee aside, traditionally funds content. The BBC’s iPlayer, of course, has none; subscription channels like Netflix avoid it; even YouTube has made ads skippable. It’s weird: I barely notice ad breaks on proper telly; but if you tell me you’re giving me the option to choose what to watch exactly when and how I want, then I resent being forced to sit through four big four-minute walls of Jet2 ads stuffed arbitrarily in there like immovable hunks of concrete. This could help explain why Walter Presents shows are doing less well than they might. But the random way they interact with the main Channel 4 outlets doesn’t help. Often, a series will debut on one of the “traditional” channels, then just disappear, the rest available only via that ad-heavy streaming service. Eyewitness’s first episode premiered on Channel 4 before being beamed up, and fared badly.
Another problem for Walter Presents shows might be the way Walter, himself, insists on presenting them. Walter Iuzzolino, that is, the channel’s curator, who shows up to instruct you how to watch: “The characters are REAL,” he demanded before Eyewitness, “It’s IMPOSSIBLE not to care about them,” prompting me to immediately find the characters unrealistic and impossible to care about. He recently demanded forthcoming Dutch series, Penoza, “is better than The Sopranos!” I’ve not seen it. I’ll tell you now. It’s not better than The Sopranos.
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