James Walton

Rival law-enforcement agencies arguing about which of them should investigate a murder has, of course, been a staple of crime dramas for decades. Rather less common, though, is for the agencies in question to be the Metropolitan Police, the Gestapo and the SS. SS-GB (BBC1, Sunday), based on Len Deighton’s novel, poses the undeniably interesting question of what this country would have been like in 1941 if Germany had won the Battle of Britain. Its primary answer is that — in every way — it would have been very murky indeed. Again, plenty of crime dramas over the years have created a suitably noirish atmosphere, while cunningly saving on the lighting budget at the same time.

With the Shannon Matthews story, it’s not easy to accentuate the positive — but BBC1’s The Moorside (Tuesday) is having a go nonetheless. Although touching at times, the result ultimately proves a rather awkward watch. Shannon was nine when she went missing from the Moorside estate, Dewsbury, in February 2008. Her mother Karen made a tearful televised appeal for the return of ‘my beautiful princess daughter’, but ended up serving four years in jail for being an accomplice in Shannon’s kidnapping. With her chaotic taxpayer-funded life, and her seven children by five fathers, Karen was duly turned into a sort of anti-poster girl for the tabloids. The Moorside itself became a symbol, including for David Cameron, of ‘our broken society’.

In early January, lastminute.com recommended its top 15 destinations for 2017. In 12th spot, just above Montreal, Croatia and Japan, was Hull. And if you’re tempted to opt for a snooty chuckle at this point, my advice would be to go to Hull — because, judging from my recent experience, even on a cold January weekend, the place is buzzing with a hugely infectious, if still slightly bashful, sense of rediscovered civic pride. ‘I’ve lived here for 50 years,’ one man told me, ‘and this is the greatest thing that’s happened to the city in my time.’ The ‘this’ he’s referring to is, of course, Hull’s status as the UK City of Culture for 2017.

‘Blimey! How on earth did they think of that?’ is unlikely to be anyone’s response to Our Dancing Town (BBC2, Tuesday). A few years ago, The Great British Bake Off was adapted into The Great British Sewing Bee by the simple process of fitting another domestic activity to the same formula. Now — after what I imagine was a brain-storming session lasting approximately 30 seconds — the BBC has taken the idea, structure and tone of Gareth Malone’s singing programmes and applied them to a series about dance. Enthusiastic evangelist for the life-changing potential of his chosen art form? Lots of initial sceptics dolefully shaking their heads and insisting that it can’t be done?

As you’ve probably noticed, TV critics spend a lot of their time trying to identify which other programmes the one they’re reviewing most resembles. Sadly, in the case of BBC2’s The Entire Universe, this noble quest proved futile. Written and emceed by Eric Idle, the show did contain plenty of familiar television elements: songs, dance troupes, Warwick Davis making jokes about how small he is, a lecture by Professor Brian Cox on the nature of the cosmos. Yet the way it mixed them together was so unprecedentedly odd that it may well have made the average Boxing Day viewer feel they must be drunker than they thought.

BBC1’s The Missing has been one of the undoubted TV highlights of 2016. Yet, even thrillers as overwhelmingly thrilling as this one have been known to blow it in the concluding episode, when the biggest revelation of the lot turns out to be that the writers couldn’t really answer all the questions that previous episodes had so intriguingly raised. And of course, The Missing had raised more than most, with its fiendish plotting ranging across three timeframes — until last week, that is, when it added a fourth. So could Wednesday’s finale possibly avoid giving us that sense of outraged disappointment that comes from realising we’ve spent weeks looking forward to a full-scale solution that never quite comes?

If I tell you that on Monday there was an hour-long documentary about the history of stamp-collecting, then you probably don’t need this column’s usual bit in brackets saying which channel it was on. Indeed, at times Timeshift: Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues seemed determined to be the most BBC4-like programme in the history of BBC4: cheerfully niche, heroically indifferent to all notions of cool and so old-school in its production style that any mention of France was introduced with a blast of accordion music. Above all — and unlike so many other documentaries elsewhere — it was wholly confident that its viewers would be interested in interesting things without having to be shrilly reminded every few minutes of how interesting they are.

In 2015, the first series of Humans (Sunday) was apparently Channel 4’s most watched home grown drama since The Camomile Lawn: a programme broadcast when Neil Kinnock was still the Labour leader and given a obvious ratings boost by the tabloid outrage about its many nude scenes (and by its many nude scenes). In the case of Humans, though, the British people can’t be accused of ulterior motives, because this is a winningly intelligent piece of sci fi that ponders, among other things, the nature of consciousness and the future of the human race. Cleverly, too, it’s set, not in a domed city of jet packing commuters, but in a world very like our own.

The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb may well be one of the 20th century’s great stories — but naturally that doesn’t mean a television drama won’t want to jazz it up a bit. Or, in the case of ITV’s lavishly produced but distinctly corny Tutankhamun, quite a lot. The programme gives us a Howard Carter younger and considerably hunkier than in real life. It throws in a couple of smitten hotties to emphasise the fact. Above all, it transforms Carter into the archaeological equivalent of a maverick TV cop: a man who doesn’t play by the rules, isn’t afraid to follow wild hunches but, by God, gets results.

At my wife’s first 12-week scan, I was expecting — and duly got — that much-documented sense of thrilled wonder at the grey blobby thing on the screen. What came as a genuine shock, though, was realising the scan also had the entirely undisguised aim of calculating the baby’s chances of Down’s syndrome, on the apparent assumption that, if they were high, we’d want to terminate. In the event, this wasn’t a dilemma we faced — which possibly makes it easy to take the moral high ground. Even so, the whole process left me feeling both uneasy and rather naive. How long had this been going on? Did everybody else know about it? And if so, when had they discussed it? A World without Down’s Syndrome?

The closing credits of National Treasure (Channel 4, Tuesday) contain the usual disclaimer that any resemblance between its characters and real people is merely coincidental. Well, coincidental maybe, but also entirely inevitable — because this is a drama based on Operation Yewtree. With its choice of subject matter, a cast including Robbie Coltrane and Julie Walters and a script by Jack Thorne (author of the all-conquering Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), the series is clearly intended as an Important Piece of Television. Yet, partly for that reason, it’s so far proving a rather careful one. Nobody who watched the first episode could accuse it of sensationalism.

Back in the high optimism of the 2008 presidential campaign, one of Barack Obama’s more extravagant hopes was that ‘the psychodrama of the baby boom generation’ would finally be left behind: that no longer would the kind of radical late-Sixties politics ‘hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago’ be seen by both its supporters and its opponents as the key to understanding more or less everything about modern life. Sadly, though, if Obama needs proof of how comprehensively this hope has been dashed, he need only head to the V&A — where, with the supporters firmly in charge, the whole story of how great the late Sixties were, how much they’ve shaped today’s world, and how much they still could (fingers crossed!

Proof that someone has really made it as a TV historian comes, I would suggest, when they join the likes of David Starkey and Simon Schama by getting their name into the programme’s title. So it is that Dominic Sandbrook’s The 70s, from 2012, has now been followed by The 80s with Dominic Sandbrook (BBC2, Thursday), a series that confirms his ability to put across moderately big ideas in a light easy style — and in a parka. Sometimes when watching television, you might be in the mood for a serious history documentary, and sometimes for a show that’ll just wash over you pleasantly. With Sandbrook — and I’m pretty sure I mean this as a compliment — you can have both.