What to watch
Mary Berry’s Country House Secrets
BBC ONE, 8.00PM
A more ambitious prospect than Mary Berry’s usual cookery series, Country House Secrets sends the erstwhile Bake Off judge to four of the nation’s great rural piles where she learns about their history, experiences their hospitality, looks upstairs and down, and, of course, cooks a few dishes. With Downton Abbey now consigned to TV history, the BBC has allowed Berry to visit its real-life equivalent, Highclere Castle, for this opener.
Owned by the Carnarvons since 1679, Highclere became renowned in the Victorian era for its parties, entertaining everyone from former prime minister Benjamin Disraeli to the future Edward VII (the latter’s festivities costing the modern equivalent of £500,000 for three nights).
The banter errs towards soporific, but no one tunes into a Mary Berry programme for highoctane thrills. Instead, she proves a refreshing antidote to the standard celebrity host, her modesty symbolised by the endearing verbal tic of prefacing gobbets of information with “I’m told” (it’s hard to imagine many other presenters giving credit to researchers so willingly). Gabriel Tate power after all, if Godless is anything to go by. While this Steven Soderbergh-produced western respects the genre’s traditions, it is not in thrall to them – this seven-parter sees outlaw Roy Goode (Jack O’connell) arriving at Alice Fletcher’s (Michelle Dockery) ranch in a town run by women. He is on the run from dangerous criminal Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels) and his gang, who have been tracking their former ally across the dust-swept plains of New Mexico. Written and directed by Logan’s Scott Frank, it combines spectacle, hardscrabble frontier life and guarded emotions with aplomb.