THE JURY: MURDER TRIAL

Channel 4, 9pm

Stripped across the next four nights, this series is not Channel 4’s first attempt to interrogate the jury system – a similar experiment called The Trial aired in 2017, with a jury considering a fictional murder charge where witnesses and accused were actors but the case was prosecuted, defended and presided over by legal professionals. This time around, the court hosts a painstaking recreation of an actual murder trial, with only names, dates and locations amended for the sake of anonymity; alongside actors playing accused, witnesses and lawyers, there are also two separate juries, each comprising retirees and jobseekers, middle managers and support workers, and each unaware of the other.

The case is one of a husband who killed his wife with a hammer, and who is citing “loss of control” as his defence against a murder conviction; a crime which appears to have just enough nuance and ambiguity to incite meaningful debate.

The concept is inevitably flawed – deliberations depend to some extent on the quality of acting – but the insights are many and useful as some of the 24 jurors reveal, sometimes inadvertently, how their own histories and beliefs can prejudice decisions. Gabriel Tate solicitor bids to turn a village shop into a family home. Yet while she has the budget, she lacks the experience – and the way ahead proves fraught with pitfalls.

THE WAY BBC One, 9pm

The central episode of this richly intriguing drama finds the Driscolls forced on the run after protests against the steelworks’ closure turn violent. The pressures they face bring longsimmering resentments to the surface, their resonance both personal and universal. Any concerns The Way could descend into didacticism, meanwhile, are negated by propulsive pacing and dramatic tension, not least from the arrival of Luke Evans’s “Welsh Catcher”, dressed like a medieval witchfinder.

The Way: Jonathan Nefydd as The Prophet

Actors collide with real jurors in this pseudo murder trial