The very best of the week ahead
Sunday Trigger Point ITV, 9PM
On the surface it’s a routine prime-time thriller, but this six-parter takes just enough risks
with the format to keep the viewer guessing. Created by first-time television writer Daniel Brierley, it follows Afghanistan veterans and bomb disposal officers Lana Washington (Vicky McClure) and Joel Nutkins (Adrian Lester) as they investigate reports of a device on a London housing estate during a heatwave. At its best it has the tight intensity of a two-hander stage play, with Washington and Nutkins reassuring, joshing and coaxing each other through the job; the sense of tension mounting outside (the flats have been cleared and the residents are mutinous) is palpable. And given exec producer Jed Mercurio’s track record for bumping off big names, the sense of jeopardy is real. Gabriel Tate
The Good Karma Hospital
ITV, 8PM
Dan Sefton’s slick, subcontinental slice of escapist charm returns for a fourth run, with new staff (Rebecca Ablack’s confident doctor; Harki Bhambra’s troubled surgeon) joining the cast for more well-appointed medical interventions. In a clear nod to Covid, the bat-borne Nipah virus breaks out, endangering the life of a young girl and many others besides. GT
Monday The Responder BBC ONE, 9PM
Crime dramas are ten-a-penny yet rarely ring true, with officers often annoyingly handsome dsome and maverick, and the he streets they patrol rarely mean. an. But this six-parter by former mer Liverpool cop Tony Schumacher macher blows those clichés out t of the Mersey. He’s created a drama ama about a bobby at the coal oal face that is visceral, painful ul and honest. Martin Freeman gives a tour-de-force turn as beat officer cer Chris Carson, who’s on the cusp p of a nervous breakdown and regularly punches es holes in the doors of the home he shares with his wife and daughter. We follow Carson on the night shift, where alone in his car he deals roughly with nuisance 999 callers and makes unholy and unwise alliances with those who can help him to medicate his emotional pain, including a scary Ian Hart. The camera barely leaves Freeman’s anguished face, allowing us into the swirling depths of his turmoil, the reasons for which become clear later. It’s a gripping, important watch. Vicki Power
I, Sniper: The Washington Killers CHANNEL 4, 10PM
This engrossing true-crime crim series recounts the terrifying terrify 2002 attacks in Washington, Washingt DC. From prison, convicted convict sniper Lee Malvo describes describe becoming a murderer at 16 as he and John Muhammad Muhamm went on a crosscountry killing killin spree. This blow-by-b blow account is i accompanied accompa by poignant poign testimony testimo from survivors su and families. fam If you can’t wait, all episodes are now available on All 4. VP
Tuesday The Gilded Age SKY ATLANTIC, 2AM & 9PM
After the disappointments of The English Game and Belgravia, Julian Fellowes’s latest lavish period series represents something like a return to form while never straying too far from his enduring preoccupations. The time and place is late 19th-century New York, as the advance of the railroads brings new money flooding into a city and society that are unsure how to handle it. The entrepreneurs are embodied by devious railroad tycoon George Russell (Morgan Spector) and his ambitious but insecure wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon); their antagonists are two curtain-twitching sisters, Christine Baranski’s waspish, wealthy snob and Cynthia Nixon’s kindly but dull spinster. Our wide-eyed guide to the world is the latter pair’s niece, Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson, daughter of Meryl Streep), arriving from backwoods Pennsylvania after her father’s death and finding herself caught between the security of the old and promise of the new. The focus on women is welcome and, if some of the cast struggle a little with Fellowes’s tendency towards exposition, they’re never less than watchable. GT
The Decade the Rich Won
BBC TWO, 9PM
Amid exploding property prices, rising poverty rates and fortunes
made in highly contentious fashion during the pandemic, this documentary talks to plenty of the key figures, from Alistair Darling and George Osborne to Jeremy Corbyn and Philip Hammond, to understand how and why, in the words of Leonard Cohen, the poor stay poor and the rich get rich. GT
Wednesday Jay Blades: Learning to Read at 51 BBC ONE, 9PM; WALES, 10.35PM
For those of us to whom it comes as second nature, the idea of having to negotiate the modern world without the ability to read is almost impossible to comprehend. Equally hard to imagine is the idea of learning to read from scratch when you’re already in your fifties. That’s the tough challenge Jay Blades, furniture restorer and presenter of the hit series The Repair Shop, takes on in this engrossing documentary, motivated by wanting to read his now-teenage daughter a story. Along the way, while struggling to master phonics and sentence structure, Blades also shares with us his personal journey through the shame, low self-esteem and professional setbacks that came with lacking this essential life skill – written off as a schoolboy in Hackney. Among the usual swamp of celebrity-fronted issues-documentaries, this stands out as how to do it with care and charm. Gerard O’Donovan
Katie Price’s Mucky Mansion CHANNEL 4, 9PM
The former model and celebrity author sets about renovating her 8,000 square-foot home in Sussex, which she bought in good condition only seven years ago but looks like it’s since been hit by a tsunami. Fortunately for Price, she has builder Steve to help her turn her refurbishment ideas into reality. Ear-defenders very much advised. GO
Thursday Survivors: Portraits of the Holocaust BBC TWO, 9PM
In 2020, the Prince of Wales commissioned seven artists to paint portraits of seven Holocaust survivors, with the results to be exhibited in the Queen’s Gallery and added to the Royal Collection. Suniti Somaiya’s powerful documentary follows the process, as the artists meet the sitters, hear their stories and consider best how to represent them on canvas, which keepsakes to feature and which aspect – the face, the hands, the eyes – to focus upon. It is a necessarily solemn hour, but not without light and humour as the pairs develop their rapports across generations. As are all seven of the sitters. Their accounts are chilling: the disappearances of parents and relatives, the unthinkable trauma of the camps, the strangeness of liberation. GT
Hotel Portofino BRITBOX
Natascha McElhone leads the cast of this sumptuous new period piece. McElhone is Bella Ainsworth, owner of a plush new hotel on the Italian Adriatic coast in 1926, facing down Mafiosi and the growing Fascist threat while dealing with a wayward husband (Mark Umbers), traumatised son (Oliver Dench) and hard-to-please guests (Adam James, Lily Frazer and Anna Chancellor). GT
Friday
The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window NETFLIX
The title of this eight-part comedythriller suggests it’s a pastiche of suburban murder mysteries such as The Girl on the Train. Which it absolutely is, but its tone is often more poignant than you might expect and its path impossible to predict. Kristen Bell plays Anna Whittaker, a divorced artist whose nine-year-old daughter died three years previously. Poleaxed by grief, Anna sits by the window drowning her sorrows (with comically ginormous glasses of wine), until she gets fired up by the handsome widowed father (Tom Riley) who moves in opposite. Soon after, Anna witnesses a murder in this pristine enclave. Or was it just a boozy delusion? Bell deftly handles Anna’s complexities, as confident with the zany comedy as she is with calamity, and Riley is well cast as the stereotypical enigmatic, possibly sinister, love interest. VP
The World’s Most Scenic River Journeys CHANNEL 5, 7PM
Your weekly dose of slow TV starts here, with narrator Bill Nighy guiding us along Norfolk’s River Bure, which winds its way through the Broads. Now home to pleasure boats, Nighy asks us to picture it a century ago, full of sailboats transporting cargo. Ahh. VP