HotTV CHOICE

We should make the most of programmes like The Referee’s A W***er while we still can. Once VAR has got its deadly grip on every level of football, rendering such people obsolete, a comedy episode about a bunch of match officials – focusing in particular on their human frailties – just won’t make any sense.

Some might suggest that this particular story, kicking off the new series of INSIDE NO 9

(10pm, BBC Two), doesn’t make a lot of sense in any case. But they’d be idiots, and you’d have my permission to slap them. The whole point of Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearmith’s series, each episode of which is an entirely selfcontained short story, is that the comedy always teeters on the brink of bonkerness, and yet somehow stays just on the right side of believable.

David Morrissey plays the key character in this one, a football ref preparing for his final game, with Ralf Little as one of his linesmen, Pemberton as the other, and Shearsmith as the fourth official. I won’t give away what’s up with them, but trust me, there’s plenty.

Elsewhere MARY BEARD’S SHOCK OF THE NUDE (9pm, BBC Two) finds the historian wondering how we should feel these days about nakedness in classic works of art. In one of its lighter moments, Mary joins a hen party at a life drawing class, to sketch a man called Julian who has all his bits out. Mary’s own sketch, she concedes, is not the best. “His genitals ought to be here,” she chuckles. “But they’re under his arm. Oh, blimey…”