The very best of the week ahead
Today Louis Theroux: Selling Sex
BBC TWO 9.00PM
Louis Theroux’s furrowed brow gets another workout in this film featuring a series of sensitively handled interviews with three British escorts. Former dental nurse Caroline regards sex work as an opportunity to explore a side of herself long repressed. Single mother Victoria is making money to raise her children and contemplating a move into pornography. Ashleigh is using her earnings to pay for art school, and claims to enjoy the work. For all that sex work has been made easier to conduct due to social media and the internet, Theroux’s findings embrace grimly familiar tales of exploitation and abuse. While he doesn’t judge the trio’s shared belief that they’re taking control of past experiences, none of them had a healthy upbringing. Could their line of work deepen long-standing vulnerabilities? It’s not without controversy (the BBC has rejected Ashleigh’s claims that she was misled over the film’s purpose), but as compelling as you’d expect from Theroux, and quietly heartbreaking by the end. Gabriel Tate
Vera
ITV, 8.00PM
Ten series in and still going strong, Brenda Blethyn’s no-nonsense DCI is back to disappoint yet more hopeful murderers in the North East. The latest quartet of whodunits begins with a body of an entrepreneur being discovered by bailiffs attempting to repossess his house. A viper’s nest of family secrets is duly uncovered. GT
Monday
Exposed: The Church’s Darkest Secret
BBC TWO, 9.00PM
Sometimes the monsters hide in plain sight. That’s the message behind this devastating film about the crimes of Bishop Peter Ball, who died last year, and the ways in which the Church of England conspired to cover up his widespread abuse. The charismatic Ball, , who became the Bishop of Gloucester, r, built a reputation as a man of simple monastic tastes, all while appearing on television to dispense wisdom and courting friends in high places, including the Prince of Wales. The reality was brutally different. Ball used his reputation as a godly man to court vulnerable young men. Central to the story is Neil Todd, the teenager who made the first allegations of abuse by Ball in the 1990s only to find his testimony ignored. It’s a shocking, if all too believable, story that will only get darker in tomorrow’s concluding episode, as the scale sca of the cover-up
is revealed. Sarah Hughes
Cold Feet
ITV, 9.00PM
Mike Bullen’s Manchester saga (now on its ninth series) provides the perfect antidote to the January doldrums with a belter of an opening episode that sees David (Robert Bathurst) fuming over his ex-wife Karen’s (Hermione Norris) new relationship with Adam (James Nesbitt). SH
Tuesday
How to Steal Pigs and Influence People
CHANNEL 4, 10.00PM
Fancy becoming a vegan activist and using social media to help rid the world of animal products? Tom Costello’s film might make you think again. For one thing, the competition for online attention could take you to extremes never intended. Take the case of Wesley Omar, aka “the pignapper” whose efforts to liberate cute piglets from piggeries led not only to a conviction but so many copycats that his own actions received less attention, and he eventually went dark. Indeed, vegan activism is so popular now that it has received its own backlash. Vegan defector Prem Hobden now leads a group that eats nothing but raw meat and turns up at animal-rights events to taunt vegans. Costello’s film cleverly explores whether, in the world of vegan influencing, finding fame has become more important than forcing change. He highlights how activism sometimes seems a substitute for other emotional needs and often distresses the animals more than if they’d been allowed to get on with their doomed lives. Still, there’s no doubting the impassioned sincerity of the majority of the activists featured, or that this film makes for diverting viewing. Gerard O’Donovan
Midsomer Murders
ITV, 8.00PM
In the final episode of the current run, a scary sword-wielding clown starts threatening people on the streets of
Swynton Magna just as Ferrabee’s Circus rolls into town. Could there be a connection? Chief Inspector Barnaby’s (Neil Dudgeon) investigation isn’t helped by his coulrophobia – a fear of clowns. GO
Wednesday Good Omens
BBC TWO, 9.00PM
Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s beloved, kaleidoscopic pre-apocalyptic comic fantasy, comes to terrestrial TV six months after its streaming debut. Good Omens is the story of an uptight angel (Michael Sheen) and a louche demon (David Tennant) who, having grown to love life on Earth, join forces to prevent the coming of age of the Antichrist (an unwitting 11-year-old called Adam) and the End of Days so eagerly awaited by their superiors. The cast, including Jon Hamm (Angel Gabriel), Anna Maxwell Martin (Beelzebub), Frances McDormand and Benedict Cumberbatch (the voices of God and the devil), and the story has a ferocious momentum that carries it through the sluggish stretch of exposition. The ambition is laudable and the incidental pleasures many. GT
24 Hours in Police Custody
CHANNEL 4, 10.00PM
A feature-length special follows the police investigation into a murder in the Cambridgeshire woods, where an absence of CCTV and witnesses makes life difficult for the detectives. GT
Thursday
Addicted to Painkillers? Britain’s Opioid Crisis
BBC TWO, 9.00PM
Anyone who has ever struggled with chronic pain knows just how easy it is to obtain opioid-based painkillers. This troubling film from Dr Michael Mosley makes clear how widespread a problem that easy access is becoming. Beginning with the stark statistic that each year more than five million Brits are prescribed opioids, Mosley goes on to speak to some of those who have struggled with addiction. In Hastings he meets Karen, who popped a disc in her back and ended up so wedded to opioids that she could barely move. Meanwhile, in Salford, Mosley hears from Brenda who believes that morphine gets her through the day. There is also a look at how pharmaceutical companies in the 1980s exploited research and, finally, some hope as those we have met start to tackle their addictions. What lingers, however, are the words of Karen’s husband Ray: “I thought the drugs would sort the pain out but instead they turned my beautiful active wife into a zombie.” SH
Einstein’s Quantum Riddle
BBC FOUR, 9.00PM
“At college my room-mates had pictures of their favourite bands, I had the 1927 Solvay Conference,” remarks Professor David Kaiser in this enthralling look at the science behind quantum theory. There’s even a thriller component, as a team attempt to close one of Albert Einstein’s most challenging loopholes. SH
Friday
Stewart Copeland’s Adventures in Music
BBC FOUR, 9.30PM
“Shakespeare doesn’t do that. Spielberg doesn’t do that. Rembrandt doesn’t do that. Music dispenses with the thinking stuff and goes direct to your feelings. I want to find out why.” Always a magnetic presence, Stewart Copeland is becoming as well known as an advocate of the social benefits of music as he is as a drummer and composer. In the superb opener to his series on the history and psychology of music, he argues that music is an innate part of our psychological and evolutionary make-up. Along the way he takes us from Germany 40,000 years ago to interviews with some of the best-known neuroscientists of our time and also gets the thoughts of esteemed musical colleagues from Bobby McFerrin to Patti Smith and his old bandmate Sting. GO
Monty Don’s American Gardens
BBC TWO, 8.30PM; WALES, 9.00PM
Deftly juggling history and horticulture, Monty Don explores gardens of early post-colonial America. Taking in a plot first planted by Thomas Jefferson, he travels on to see how long-established gardens have contributed to the charms of Miami, Charleston and New Orleans. GO