James Walton

Nobody could argue that Andrew Davies isn’t up for a challenge. He’d also surely be a shoo-in for Monty Python’s Summarise Proust competition. After turning both War and Peace and Les Misérables into satisfying, unhurried six-part drama series, he’s now taken on Vikram Seth’s 1,300-page novel A Suitable Boy. The first episode started with a wedding that immediately established the programme’s visual sumptuousness, while also serving as a handy introduction to the main characters. The groom’s rebellious brother Maan, for example, chafed at the idea that he was supposed to be next.

It might seem a bit of a stretch to see deep similarities between Michaela Coel (young, female, black and currently very fashionable indeed) and the late Philip Roth (increasingly discredited as an embodiment of all those phallocentric white guys who once ruled American fiction merely because they were great writers). Nonetheless, this week’s television made it hard not to. On Tuesday night, as an adaptation of Roth’s The Plot Against America began on Sky Atlantic, Coel’s I May Destroy You was serving up a dazzling final episode that confirmed how Rothian the series has been.

When a 90-minute documentary is introduced with the words ‘This is the M25’, you’d be within your rights not to feel your heart soar. Nor would you necessarily expect what follows to be full of wonders of all kinds — natural, historical, literary and scientific. Yet this is exactly what happened in BBC Four’s The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway, presented by Helen Macdonald. Macdonald is best known for her 2014 bestseller H is for Hawk, which mixed memoir and falconry with a biography of the author T.H. White. In Tuesday’s programme, she was on similarly genre-blending form as she set off on a television journey that, in a rare twist, was an actual journey: clockwise around the M25 from junction one in Kent.

This week, BBC1 brought us a three-part dramatisation of an ‘unprecedented crisis’ in recent British life. Among other things, it featured a lockdown, an extensive tracking and tracing programme, much heroism from people on the front line, and much confusion among scientists as to how to provide the facts when they didn’t really know them. The Salisbury Poisonings (Sunday–Tuesday) was presumably made well before you-know-what. Yet watching the programme in the current circumstances, it wasn’t easy to decide whether the timing was good or bad luck for the makers. The obvious parallels did lend a haunting, drone-note resonance to proceedings. On the other hand, they sometimes threatened to overshadow what was a fine, even rather noble drama in its own right.

On the face of it, a French-language drama about a Parisian symphony orchestra mightn’t sound like the most action-packed of TV watches. In fact, though, Philharmonia (Sundays) is pretty much Dallas with violins. The first episode began with the eponymous orchestra blasting out a spot of what Shazam assured me was Dvorak, before its elderly conductor dropped his baton and collapsed to the floor, never to rise again. Cue a pair of Gallically elegant female lower legs making their way through the airport as one Hélène Barizet arrived from New York to take over the role. David was left in a tartan bag in Belfast; Helen was discovered in a tartan bag in a Dundalk phone box Not that her appointment was universally welcomed.

Arena: The Changin’ Times of Ike White (Monday) had an extraordinary story to tell — but one that, halfway through the documentary, already seemed to be complete. So, you might well have thought at that point, how would it fill the rest of the time? The answer, it transpired, was by taking an even more jaw-dropping turn. In the 1970s, Ike White was serving life for murder in a Californian prison when reports of his musical talent reached the record producer Jerry Goldstein. A prodigy on guitar, bass, drums and keyboards, White had until then been making most of his music in the prison’s gas chamber, which he was allowed to use as a rehearsal room.

Danny Brocklehurst, the scriptwriter for Sky One’s Brassic, used to work for Shameless in its glory days — although if you didn’t know that already you could probably guess. For a start, the central characters are another close-knit group of ducking-and-diving working-class northerners not overburdened with a social conscience. But there’s also the fact that, no matter what they get up to, they’re clearly supposed to be lovable — coupled with the rather more mysterious fact that they are. However dark the storylines theoretically become, the programme presents them with such an infectious swagger, and such a thorough blurring of realism and wild imagination, that the result is not merely funny but somehow joyous.

There were plenty of TV shows around this week designed to cheer us up. Sky Atlantic’s Gangs of London, however, wasn’t one of them. After decades of desensitisation, it’s not easy for any film or television programme these days to make its screen violence genuinely horrifying. Yet, by my reckoning, Thursday’s first episode managed to do it at least twice before the opening credits had even rolled. By the time they did, it was clear that two terrified Welsh lowlifes from some kind of travellers’ camp had been tricked into carrying out a hit on Finn Wallace (Colm Meaney), London’s most powerful criminal boss — rather than, as they’d fondly imagined, ‘just some paedo’. But that was clear only to us.

There can’t be many programmes that bring to mind quotations from both Henry Kissinger and Boney M., but BBC2’s The Countess and the Russian Billionaire was one of them. While Kissinger’s idea that ‘power is the ultimate aphrodisiac’ may be a little out of fashion in the #MeToo age, it was hard not to think it played a part in the eye-popping events that Wednesday’s documentary laid out with some relish. As for Boney M., rarely has ‘Oh, those Russians’ from ‘Rasputin’ felt so penetratingly insightful. The programme began filming in 2015, with the apparent aim of providing a ringside seat at a fight between an excitingly wealthy British-based couple and the Russian government.

First shown on BBC Scotland, Harry Birrell Presents Films of Love and War (BBC4, Wednesday) was the documentary equivalent of a William Boyd novel, showing us a 20th-century life shaped by 20th-century history. The programme was made by Harry’s granddaughter Carina, who’d been eight when he died, and known him only as ‘a lovable, frail, blind old man’. But then she came across 400 carefully labelled reels of film in the family shed, together with an equally well-organised collection of diaries. Exactly — or even vaguely — when this discovery took place was one of many details that Carina tantalisingly failed to disclose. (Now and again, we did see her dusting off old cannisters with a look of surprise, but this felt distinctly like re-enactment.

Sky One’s Breeders (Thursday) bills itself as an ‘honest and uncompromising comedy’ about parenting. To this end, the opening scene featured Martin Freeman as Paul trying to do some work while his two children under seven made a bit of noise a couple of rooms away. Having given himself a little pep talk about not screaming at them, Paul then screamed at them — bursting in on their blameless fun to yell: ‘Jesus fucking Christ! How many times do I have to tell you to be quiet?’ He further informed them that he was going to leave home and they should ‘tell mummy that daddy’s gone cos he couldn’t stand the fucking noise anymore.

Not much was clear in the opening scenes of The Pale Horse (BBC1, Sunday), which even by current TV standards were admirably committed to confusing us with a series of baffling fragments. One thing that did seem apparent, though, was that Mark Easterbrook (Rufus Sewell) wasn’t having much luck with the ladies. In one fragment, he cradled the corpse of his new wife who’d just electrocuted herself in the bath. A few fragments later — some of them featuring an old woman lying in bed with her hair falling out — he woke up in a Soho starlet’s flat to find a rat dead in the sink and the starlet dead in the bed.

One of the many astonishing things about the BBC2 drama The Windermere Children (Monday) was that the real-life story it told isn’t better known already. In August 1945, 300 Jewish children, who just a short time before had been starving in Nazi concentration camps, arrived at a converted seaplane factory in the Lake District. None, as far as they knew, had any family left, and none could speak any English. Waiting to welcome them was Leonard Montefiore of the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief who’d raised the money to turn the factory into a carefully thought-out rehabilitation centre — and amid the wreckage of Eastern Europe had liaised with the Red Cross, the RAF, the Czech authorities and the British Home Office to fly them in.

Victoria, a single mother in her early thirties, is getting her children ready for school — ensuring an equitable distribution of toast and issuing a series of determinedly patient instructions. (‘Listen to Mummy, you need to put your socks on.’) Once they’re gone, she then heads to a hotel to meet the first man that day who’ll be paying her £250 for sex. ‘It’s the perfect job for me,’ she explains cheerfully. ‘Very flexible.’ Victoria was one of three women featured in Louis Theroux: Selling Sex (BBC2, Sunday) for which Louis furrowed his familiar brow, adopted his finely honed bemused expression and set off to investigate transactional sex in digital-age Britain.