What to watch
White Gold BBC TWO, 10.00PM; NI, 11.45PM
This new, six-part comedy from The Inbetweeners writer Damon Beesley takes us back to 1983, a time when draught proofing became a national obsession and having UPVC patio doors meant that you were winning at life. And Beesley, who’s mined his childhood experience of being the son of a doubleglazing salesman, has created a sharply written and humorous story about the dodgy shenanigans and petty rivalries of a bunch of Essex boys on the make.
Vincent Swan (Gossip Girl’s Ed Westwick) is charismatic and also a bit of a berk, but he’s living the dream as a riotous, fast-talking peddler who will do almost anything for a sale. Although if his team – weasily Brian Fitzpatrick (James Buckley) and sheepish Martin Lavender (Joe Thomas), both also of Inbetweeners fame – put as much thought, effort and enthusiasm into trying to win customers as they did making bets and firing insults at each other, then they might actually make a decent turnover.
There’s plenty of similarities to the hit E4 comedy, especially in the audacity and the rhythm of the language, and the buoyant soundtrack – from The Blockheads to Chic – is most agreeable, even if Vince’s tasteless sales patter isn’t. Rachel Ward