Sunday

Babs

8pm, BBC One

Across the 2000s, a craze for biographical dramas about famous faces from our recent pop cultural past – actors, comedians, a few politicians and sports figures, but above all a surprising number of people who appeared in Carry On films – has been one of British television’s most notable fads. And, in part because we usually brought our own slow-cooked emotional associations with us going in, a genre with a remarkably high strike rate.

At their best, in plays like The Deal, Peter Morgan’s brilliant dissection of the Tony Blair- Gordon Brown relationship, these things have not only documented lives and the events that formed them, but got under the skin of their subjects and our society with serious, probing intent. Crucially, though, the best have all had a wicked sense of fun.

The curious thing is that, with few exceptions (perhaps only one: Longford, Morgan’s searching 2006 study of the campaigning Labour peer and his association with Myra Hindley), all the most successful and most memorable have been about what might laughingly be called the less serious subjects. The films on politicians and figures of state have tended toward shades of comedy, farce and pantomime, while the plays on comedians and other entertainers (Kenneth Williams, Fanny Craddock, Harry H Corbett & Wilfrid Brambell, Morecambe & Wise, even Neil Baldwin, the Stoke City mascot immortalised in Marvellous) have reached for magic, romance, inspiration and tragedy.

Recently, the genre has slowed a little, and shown signs of flagging, as what was once surprising solidified into a set style. Many later films have had a slight air of being knocked out to conform to format, rather than being made by people who had a burning passion to make them. Now, the whole thing seems to be coming full circle. The entire biopic goldrush really began with 2000’s Cor Blimey, an unexpectedly moving ITV film about Sid James’s relationship with Barbara Windsor, which set the tone for the complex treatments dished out to the Carry On troupe in later productions. Samantha Spiro played Windsor in that, and tonight she dons the blonde curls again as the older Babs for another heartfelt, if less unexpected and infinitely more sugary look at Windsor’s life.

Written by former EastEnders writer Tony Jordan, who no doubt shares the BBC’s noble belief that Barbara Windsor ranks among our most treasurable national treasures, the play begins in 1993, when, at a low ebb, skint and pushing 60, Windsor is working a string of one-nighters in grey seaside towns. In one rundown end-of-the-pier pavilion, during the break between matinee and evening shows, she is magically visited Christmas Carol-style by the ghosts of her past, led by her father, who takes her back through her life, loves, gangsters and giggles from 1943-1993.

Spiro’s touching performance is complemented by Jaime Winstone, who is strong and spirited as the younger, wigglier, bombshelly Windsor, without ever being very much like her – a fact underlined when the real Windsor turns up as the ghost of Babs Future. (Having also made a cameo in Cor Blimey, Windsor now joins a very small number of actors who have appeared twice in their own biopics.) It’s a sweet, if overly sentimental tribute, although I was never entirely sure why anyone was asking me to watch it. The film really sparks to life around halfway through, however, when Zoë Wanamaker appears in a sharp, striking and spiky performance as legendary theatre director Joan Littlewood, perhaps wondering why no one is making any dramas about her.

Monday

Loaded

10pm, Channel 4

When it comes to skewering, dissecting and popping the bubbles of the app-happy start-up age, no TV series has come close to Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, a comedy that manages to be sharp, shaggy, scathing, charming and brilliantly terrifying at the same time. (Season 4 continues on Sky Atlantic 10pm tonight.) This home grown sitcom, about four pals who are transformed into multi-millionaires overnight after selling a smartphone game they developed, has enough parallels to make comparisons difficult to avoid, and they don’t do it many favours. But it’s amiable enough, and might develop its own character. Actually based on an Israeli series, it’s slightly less concerned with holding a mirror to our techno times than in squeezing gags from the effects of vast and sudden wealth on a British slacker quartet, Josh (Jim Howick), Leon (Samuel Anderson), Watto (Nick Helm) and Ewan (Johnny Sweet), who have just sold their app, “Cat Factory.” But their newfound riches could be threatened when someone claims they stole the idea.

Tuesday

Eurovision Song Contest Semi-Finals

8pm, BBC Four

Once again, it’s time for The Difficult Question. In years gone by, aside from the UK entry, we had absolutely no idea what monsters our European allies would be sending to do battle in the Eurovision Song Contest final, and so would tune in on the big night in a state of high anticipation, all a-tremble about what unthought-of sounds and visions were about to unfold. These days, though, you can watch two two-hour semi-finals in the days before the main event. The question is, should you? Or should you keep yourself pure until Saturday, when this year’s Ukrainian war is declared properly? Is there such a thing as too much Eurovision? Could there be? In any case, in the first of this week’s semis, 18 international pop dreamers assemble in Kiev, scrambling for one of the ten places in Saturday's final. My prayers go tonight with Moldova’s Sunstroke Project. Semi Final 2 follows Thursday, when Lithuania’s Fusedmarc are the ones to watch, while Romania’s Ilinca & Alex Florea go old-school nuclear, and bring out the nu-yodelling.

Wednesday

King Charles III

9pm, BBC Two

Sadly (and perhaps because people are already jumping up to say how controversial and distasteful it is and how the BBC should be abolished immediately) no previews were being made available for this drama in time for these pages going to print. But it should be worth seeing. A one-off, it comes adapted by Mike Bartlett and director Rupert Goold from their own acclaimed 2015 stage production, a speculative piece of future history with a thrillerish feel, in which, following the Queen’s death, Charles is crowned king. But after his long wait, he immediately faces a serious constitutional crisis that puts him at loggerheads with William and Kate – meanwhile, Diana’s ghost haunts his palace. Amping up the Shakespearean dynamics, Bartlett wrote the script in iambic pentameter: “My life has been a ling’ring for the throne…Aside from everything else, it should be seen as a tribute to the late Tim Pigott-Smith, who died last month, reprising his stage performance as Charles, which many critics hailed the best of his career.

Thursday

Born To Kill

9pm, Channel 4

It’s the last episode of this uneasy drama, exploring the psychotic tendencies of a teenage schoolboy, Sam (a fine and troubling lead from Jack Rowan). His mother, Jenny (a fraying Romola Garai), is growing desperate, and turning to whatever professional help she can in an effort to get to the bottom of his increasingly dangerous behaviour. But time is against her efforts, what with the release from prison of his estranged murderer father Peter (Richard Coyle) – not to mention the fact that Sam has already secretly claimed two victims himself, the second Jenny’s best friend, Cathy, whose funeral is about to unfold. Aided by excellent performances from Lara Peake as the girl who forms a gang of two with Sam, and Daniel Mays as her father, the series has been a cold simmer until now, but it comes bubbling to a furious final boil tonight. After such a dark debut as a writing team, it will be interesting to see what Kate Ashfield and Tracey Malone might do next.

Friday

I Love Dick

Amazon Prime Video

This is the new drama from Transparent creator Jill Soloway but, while just as committed about the issues, it’s not as endearing. The series is based on Chris Kraus’s 1997 book, a provocative blur of gossipy memoir and satirical fiction exploring her fixation on a male intellectual. In this version, Chris (Kathryn Hahn) is a filmmaker who accompanies her academic husband Sylvere (Griffin Dunne) when he’s asked to teach a summer residency at an exclusive art workshop in Marfa, Texas. The place is run by Dick Jarrett (Kevin Bacon), a lithe, laid back, coolly macho sculptor and writer, who – in part because he disdains most of what she represents – becomes the focus of Chris’s fierce sexual and artistic obsession. There are interesting ideas, but little subtlety, battering you around the head with discourses on “the male gaze,” and a line in unlikeable characters that begins to grate. It possibly doesn’t help that Bacon’s most high profile work here recently was those endless phone ads – you might as well get the Go Compare opera singer in.

Saturday

Doctor Who

7.15pm, BBC One

There are some strange, stark, surreal and spooky monsters on the prowl tonight, behind-the-sofa creatures that will sing beneath your nightmares for weeks to come. But before The Eurovision Song Contest 2017 gets underway in Kiev (8pm, BBC One), there is this week’s Doctor Who. Following last week’s fairy tale, tonight’s episode is, at heart, another good little story in the old-school throwback Who mould, a zombies-in-space adventure, set aboard a dark space station where the oxygen supply is fast running out. Most of the crew have already been murdered….but still they walk! The Tardis has taken The Doctor, Bill and Nardole (Matt Lucas finally given a bit more to do) into a future where oxygen is controlled by corporations and sold by the breath, and space suits are valued more highly than their occupants. As the Doctor gasps: “Capitalism in space!” It’s good stuff, with Capaldi in full flow, several tense time-running-out scenes that younger viewers will certainly remember, and, by heck, a cliffhanger.

LAST WEEK….

A dependable steady date ended this week, as Line Of Duty (BBC One) disappeared. The series concluded in troubling ways, although not necessarily because of anything that was going on inside it. The most disconcerting thing about writer Jed Mercurio’s silly symphony of corrupt cops is how so many people, and some of them not even being paid by the BBC, seem happy to proclaim it as any kind of high water mark for British television drama.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed it, I look forward to seeing Big Ted Hastings again, and the interview scenes remain superb fun, allowing actors a rare chance to play intense, extended games of ping-pong with dialogue and expression. The real joy of Line Of Duty, though, is surely just giving yourself over to how daft it is, and watching to see how long Mercurio can continue running around thinking up 1920s-style pulp twists (Then he tries to saw her head open! Then it turns out she’s a spy! Then her hand comes off! Then it turns out he’s a spy! It’s something beginning with…H!) to string together the reams of exposition his characters deliver instead of anything anyone might say.

A good example of LOD’s inability to believably recreate any recognisable human dynamic was given this series in the depiction of semi-villain Roz Huntley’s relationship with her family. The idea that she was driven solely by her ambition for her stalled career is fair enough, but not enough to explain why everyone in her household interacted as though they had only just met in the script read-through two days before. For all the chemistry on display, her kids might as well have been cardboard cut outs on roller skates, while, as Roz’s husband, Lee Ingleby’s sole function was to jump up and down shouting “Jimmy Lakewell, Jimmy Lakewell,” and then stare significantly at the words JIMMY LAKEWELL on his phone, in case anyone missed the clue.

Compare this with the texture, layers, life and inexplicable human drift in notionally similar American crime sagas – The Wire, The Sopranos – and claims that this is drama for the ages looks embarrassed. Put it beside the strange, feverish madness of Hugo Blick’s BBC Two corruption serial of 2011, The Shadow Line, and it looks thin and uninspired.

It’s the same line of propaganda that would have you believe there was anything interesting about Tom Hiddleston’s performance in The Night Manager. The buzz helps sell these shows internationally. But it also helps stifle anything truly great, wild, and organic breaking out. If there are any scary and stubborn new monsters lurking out there in the lost line of British TV creators like Alan Clarke and Dennis Potter, the chances of them bursting into our living rooms at prime time are disappearing. 30 years ago, BBC One’s Sunday night 9pm offering was The Singing Detective. Putting Line Of Duty beside that is like holding a Bazooka Joe strip to Samuel Beckett. I’m not knocking Bazooka Joe, but we can’t survive on nothing but bubblegum.