The very best of the week ahead
Today Attenborough’s Life in Colour BBC ONE, 7PM
Early on in this eyepopping short series on the function of colour in the natural world there’s a shot of Sir David Attenborough helping two yellowbeaked toucans pluck berries from a bush. It’s just one of a number of sequences in which he gently observes wild creatures up close, managing to be both completely charming and delightfully reminiscent of his work in pioneering series such as Life on Earth. It’s also a reminder that, unlike many shows he appears in nowadays, this series was actually scripted by his own hand. Essentially, it’s a primer on how different species see and utilise colour in all its forms, more often than not for courtship displays but also as an aid to species identification, communication and defence. It is a typically globestraddling affair, taking in scowling mandrills in Gabon, pole-dancing birds of paradise and tiny poison-dart frogs in South America, arm-wrestling fiddler crabs in Australia and much more. Gerard O’Donovan
McDonald & Dodds ITV, 8PM
A star-packed return for the entertainingly cosy crime series with Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins perfectly mismatched as chalk-andcheese West Country police detectives. Tonight, Dodds (Watkins) finds a soul mate in an uptight air-accident investigator (Rob Brydon) when a wealthy foursome’s (Martin Kemp, Cathy Tyson, Rupert Graves and Patsy Kensit) balloon ride over Bath goes fatally wrong. GO
Monday The Hunt for Gaddafi’s afi’s Billions: Storyville BBC FOUR, 10PM
The latest from the thoughthoughtprovoking Storyville strand is the dark and immersive tale of what happened after Libya’s infamous dictator Colonel olonel Muammar Gaddafi fell ell from grace. Following the Arab Spring in 2010 and early arly 2011, Gaddafi swiftly realised that this was s no country for old politics, cs, or indeed old men. Deciding to flee Libya, a,
he also took steps to take his billions of dollars (Libya was believed to be one of the richest countries in the world) with him. He died in 2011 and the whereabouts of the money was lost. This enthralling documentary follows the involvement of a rag-tag group of South African mercenaries, spies, government officials and even former ANC Leader Jacob Zuma as they search for said money even as the death count and disappearances rise. It’s not all about the present day, however, as the film-makers explore links between liberation theory in South Africa and Libya, and expla explain how their alliance came to be and what benefits it held for each side. S So what did happen to the missing mo money? Storyville offers no easy ans answers, but the implicati implication is that it left the country only to be lost in the ether an and will never be found. Sarah S Hughes
Max Cli Clifford: The Fall of a Tabloi Tabloid King
CHANNEL 4, 9PM 9
“I had my cake and wanted everyone else’s e as well,” states one-time publicist p Max Clifford during this thi enthralling if incredibly uncomfortable
watch. While the fact that Clifford was a monster hiding in plain sight is news to no one – he was sentenced in 2014 on paedophilia charges and died in prison in 2017 – what is more interesting are the newspaper editors, stars and politicians willing to cover those crimes up. SH
Tuesday Why is Covid Killing People of Colour? BBC ONE, 9PM
More often seen fronting British documentaries than starring in British dramas these days, Homeland actor David Harewood follows up his excellent films on discrimination in education and politics ( Will Britain Ever Have a Black Prime Minister?) and the stigma of mental illness ( Psychosis and Me) with an equally thoughtful examination of structural racism in healthcare and beyond. His investigation, underpinned by research from Dr Guddi Singh, is rooted in a mountain of statistics highlighting the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on ethnic minorities. Before long, however, it spirals out to examine the
unarguable connections between underlying health conditions and deprivation, and the circumstances that can make minority communities more vulnerable to the virus. Harewood’s climactic showdown with Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch simmers with anger yet proves frustrating on several different levels. Even so, his enquiries raise so many important questions in so many different areas that the results deserve to be seen, chewed over and argued about at the highest levels.
Gabriel Tate Your Honor SKY ATLANTIC, 9PM
Breaking Bad fans will no double be thrilled to see Bryan Cranston reprise his Good Man Forced To Do Bad Things shtick in Peter Moffat’s adaptation of an Israeli series: here he is a New Orleans judge forced to reconsider moral and legal boundaries when his son is involved in a hit and run with the scion of a crime dynasty. But Your Honor, despite powerhouse casting (Michael Stuhlbarg, Margo Martindale, Maura Tierney, Carmen Ejogo) is a relentlessly grim misfire, intentionally or otherwise featuring too many callbacks to better work from its fine ensemble. GT
Wednesday The Terror
BBC TWO, 9PM & 9.45PM
From Ridley Scott’s Scott Free production company for AMC in America comes this chilling drama, loosely based on the story of a “lost” expedition of the 1840s. It follows the icy tribulations of two Royal Navy ships, the Erebus and the Terror, on a doomed attempt to discover the fabled Northwest Passage through the Arctic, led by the Victorian explorer Sir John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds). A thumping pair of opening episodes lays the groundwork skilfully – the hubris, the fatal errors of judgment, the rising tensions between the blowhard Commander James Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies) of the Erebus and the more experienced, capable and world-weary Captain Francis Crozier (Jared Harris) of the Terror. As a result, a terrific head of suspense builds up even before the horror begins, when eerie occurrences suggest something remorseless and unworldly is behind the ships’ mounting travails. GO
Fergie’s Killer Dresser: The Jane Andrews Story
ITV, 9PM
Sex, money and a close link to royalty. The murder of her millionaire boyfriend Tom Cressman by a former lady-in-waiting to Sarah Ferguson was, for obvious reasons, one of the tabloid sensations of the early Noughties. This film looks back at the case asking whether, as her defence psychologist still insists, Jane Andrews’s conviction was an injustice? GO
Thursday Piers Morgan’s Life Stories ITV, 9PM
This latest edition of Life Stories promises to be an explosive one – and not just because the outspoken Rupert Everett once called Morgan “hung like budgie” (no one inquired as to how he knew). Still, such criticism will be like water off the supremely self-confident Morgan’s slippery back and this should be an hour of no-holds-barred gossip and tantalising titbits. Anyone who has read Everett’s louche diaries will know what to expect: the repressed Home Counties background, the mother he adored, the rigid Catholic boarding school and the subsequent rush to the bright lights of the Seventies and Eighties gay scen, an era about which he now feels a strong strain of melancholy. An old trouper, he is sure to keep the conversation ticking along nicely while throwing Morgan the occasional new bone to chew on. Sarah Hughes
DH Lawrence: Sex, Exile and Greatness
SKY ARTS, 7PM
DH Lawrence was described by EM Forster as “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation”. This film uses readings from his work to explore a man who, dogged by ill health and poverty, was often persecuted for his explicit subject matter. SH
Friday Deutschland 89 MORE4, 9PM
The third series of this outstanding German political thriller picks up the
action three years on. It kicks off hours before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and our slightly gormless hero, Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay), finds himself again in the thick of it. Spy Rauch is blackmailed by his Stasi bosses into a perilous mission to courier documents to East German leaders that could effectively bring down the government. Threatened with losing custody of his son if he declines, Rauch agrees, and a high-tension sequence unfolds. Shot in the same rich shades of brown-grey as before, the air thick with cigarette smoke and a growing sense that the world is imploding, episode one has a visceral feel and is wonderfully atmospheric. Vicki Power
Grayson’s Art Club CHANNEL 4, 8PM
The nation’s favourite art teacher and his psychotherapist wife Philippa invite actor Russell Tovey to join them to share his love of contemporary art and show off his artistic flair. He and Perry peruse this week’s public submissions on the theme of nature in a joyful series that encourages us to explore our creative sides. VP