MAYFAIR WITCHES

BBC Two, 9pm

Among the glittering ensemble of the first season of The White

Lotus, Alexandra Daddario made a big impression as a journalist who eventually compromises hard-won principles. For this latest Anne Rice adaptation which, like Interview with a Vampire, is an

AMC import, she plays Rowan Fielding, a brilliant but solitary Californian neurosurgeon who, after unsuccessfully asking her egotistical superior for his support in putting her terminally ill adoptive mother forward for a stem-cell trial, witnesses his gruesome demise.

But was she in some way responsible?

In New Orleans some decades earlier, meanwhile, a young woman is seduced from the strict upbringing of her aunt into a world of magic, sex and a malevolent spirit called Lasher (Jack Huston). When she falls pregnant, her life hangs in the balance; how does she age into Annabeth Gish’s catatonic matriarch, and what is her connection to Rowan? It takes some time for the tangled mythology to come together and the opener is stronger on intrigue than actual scares, but Mayfair Witches is atmospheric, strange and enjoyably camp, with Daddario working wonders. Gabriel Tate commission to paint the pioneering primatologist Dr Jane Goodall – the world’s preeminent chimpanzee expert – a task documented straight after at 9pm.

BBC One, 9pm

Ashley Jensen has slipped seamlessly into this partial reboot following the departure of Douglas Henshall’s Jimmy Pérez : tonight’s conclusion finds Calder (Jensen) and Tosh (Alison O’Donnell) working together while the police search the Bains’ farm in their hunt for clues to the killer’s identity.

Alexandra Daddario stars in this Anne Rice adaptation