The very best of the week ahead
Today The Pursuit of Love BBC ONE, 9PM
Emily Mortimer’s vivid, kinetic three-part adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s novel of the twin follies of romance and aristocratic entitlement in the Twenties is a feast for eyes and ears, bursting with ideas and big performances. Lily James and Emily Beecham star as cousins Linda and Fanny, one free-spirited and flighty, the other dependable and practical, as they negotiate impossible relatives, adolescent crushes and the onset of adulthood. Mortimer, adapting and making her directorial debut, throws everything at it – freeze-frames, chronological mischief, Marc Bolan – and when it works, it really works. New Order’s Ceremony is a thrilling soundtrack to Linda’s artistic awakening at the hands of Andrew Scott’s show-stealing Lord Merlin. The performances are invariably lively, Dominic West threatening to unbalance the piece as Linda’s roister-doistering Uncle Matthew, while Freddie Fox, as Tony Kroesig, continues to hone his line in aristocrats with distasteful attitudes. Beecham subtly commands attention in the less showy lead role, while James’s class really shows as she allows the sadness underneath the silliness to unfurl, when Linda makes a decision that is both life-changing and almost certainly wrong. Gabriel Tate
Gods of Snooker
BBC TWO, 9PM
“Dallas with balls.” Barry Hearn’s characterisation of snooker’s glory years may sound like hyperbole but, as this splendidly enjoyable series demonstrates, the associated sex, drugs and (if you count t Snooker Loopy) rock ’n’ roll ensured that at the soap opera away from the baize aize was at least as gripping as the action on it. This opener focuses on Alex Higgins, the manner of f whose rise predicated a rapid fall. GT
Monday
Three Families
BBC ONE 9PM
It was only two years ago that the women of Northern Ireland were granted the right to an abortion, 52 years after r the rest of the UK. This s two-part piece, written n by Gwyneth Hughes, dramatises the stories of a trio of women wanting abortions but denied them prior to the law changing. We meet two here and that’s quite enough, given the terrible emotional toll their unwanted pregnancies take on them and us. Sinéad Keenan, who packed a punch in 2017’s Little Boy Blue, turns in another gutsy performance as warrior mum Theresa, who contravenes her own beliefs to help her daughter terminate a pregnancy and ends up in trouble with the law law. Elsewhere, Hannah (Amy Jam James-Kelly) learns that her baby has abnormalities and she must car carry it to full term. The anony anonymised tales are allo allowed to unfold g gradually in order to engender indignation in viewers at the stress the w women endure and the treatment meted out by a heartless system. Concludes tomorrow. Vicki Power
Inside No 9
BBC TWO, 9.30PM
Once again, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith show off their inventiveness in this sixth run of their pitch-black comedy anthology. Tonight they jettison the Tales of the Unexpected vibe for a surreal pastiche of heist movies, with a story about a diamond theft executed by a bunch of clowns, literally. Sublime. VP
Tuesday Hospital BBC TWO 9PM
This affecting series about life on the NHS front-line returns, this time from University Hospital Coventry, which last year kicked off the UK’s vaccine programme with the very first jab. Covid still dominates everything during filming. Despite diminishing infection numbers, the hospital’s emergency and intensive care units are still operating at capacity – and with more than 5,000 patients now awaiting surgery for over a year and a further 50,000 awaiting treatment, dealing with the backlog is a serious issue. With so few critical care beds available, life and death decisions are having to be made – and, as illustrated by the case of one woman with a hip problem, being in chronic pain doesn’t get you a place on the surgery list when someone else is in danger of dying. Even so, perhaps the most shocking revelation in this film is the number of NHS staff still refusing to be vaccinated. Gerard O’Donovan
State Opening of Parliament
BBC ONE, 10.30AM
The essentials remain, including the procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster, as the Queen makes her way to the House the Lords to set out the government’s agenda. GO
Wednesday Danny Boy BBC TWO, 9PM
In May 2004, members of the 1st Battalion Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment were sent to assist British soldiers ambushed at Checkpoint Danny Boy in southern Iraq. What happened next became the subject of a court dispute as dramatised by Robert Jones in this powerful one-off that considers often diametrically opposed notions of justice and patriotism. Were the prisoners, taken by Lance Corporal Brian Wood (Anthony Boyle) and his comrades, militiamen or farmers? And were they tortured? How reliable can memories, clouded by the fog of war, really be years down the line? Having forced a public inquiry, dogged human-rights lawyer Phil Shiner (Toby Jones) attempts to navigate the differences between war and unlawful killing as two men find themselves compromised. Jones does charismatic but flawed with characteristic brilliance, while Boyle again makes you wonder why he isn’t better known. Wood’s struggles with a domineering father and concerned wife fall the right side of melodrama and the conclusion makes its points without judgment. GT
Davina McCall: Sex, Myths and the Menopause
CHANNEL 4, 9PM
Davina McCall talks frankly about her experiences of the menopause and her struggles to find effective treatment, also meeting other women who have been left to manage their difficult symptoms with little support. GT
Thursday Secrets of the Krays
BRITBOX
“Are we talking about clever people… top-line criminals? We are not. All they had was fear and intimidation,” says one former criminal confederate of Reggie and Ronnie Kray in this three-part series. The emphasis (in this rare original commission by BritBox) is very much on the Krays’ crazed obsession with violence and the kind of gangster chic that only ever existed in the B-movies that inspired them. Among the items produced in evidence is a scrapbook into which Reggie pasted, from the age of 16, every report in the papers of the brothers’s ultra-violent rampages. Plenty of anecdotes, too, of how their quest for notoriety bought them kudos in some fashionable quarters and how their belief that they were untouchable was rooted in their influence over politicians with a taste for sleaze. GO
Kew Gardens: A Year in Bloom
CHANNEL 5, 8PM
A four-parter filmed over a unique year at Kew Gardens. We begin deep in winter, a busy time when the last thing any of the staff anticipate is a pandemic that will close the gardens for the first time in decades. GO
Friday
The Underground Railroad AMAZON PRIME VIDEO
This new 10-part drama has impressive pedigree. It’s adapted from the prize-winning 2016 novel, and the director and adaptor is Barry Jenkins, whose movie Moonlight won the Best Picture Oscar. It focuses on the journey of two slaves along the network of routes and safe houses that helped runaways to flee the South, which is represented in here as an actual railway, though no such thing existed. Episode one is devoted to depicting the horrors of the Georgia plantation on which Cora (Thuso Mbedu) and Caesar (Aaron Pierre) live and work until they’re so ground down by it they make their escape. As with Moonlight, there’s an elegiac quality to Jenkins’s portrayal of this hellish universe on the plantation; the tension felt by slaves living under the threat of violence is amplified by Nicholas Britell’s insistent score and the earworm quality of the cicadas. VP
Matt Deighton: Overshadowed SKY ARTS, 9PM
An ode to charming singer-songwriter Matt Deighton, former frontman of the acid-jazz band Mother Earth. He takes us through his career and battles with mental health that have kept him out of the spotlight. VP