The very best of the week ahead
Today
Baptiste BBC ONE, 9PM
This spin-off of Harry and Jack Williams’s excellent drama The Missing returns for a second series. But it doesn’t reach the heights of the show that gave birth to the eponymous character, focusing more on the superannuated sleuth (Tchéky Karyo) and his personal troubles. In this six-parter he operates, inexplicably, as an unpaid private detective who flies to Hungary uninvited after learning of the disappearance of the husband and two teenage sons of British ambassador Emma Chambers. Baptiste elbows himself into the investigation, gains Chambers’s trust and starts to figure it all out ahead of the local cops. It helps greatly that Chambers is played by Fiona Shaw, who brings the character’s despair vividly to life. The first episode jumps between time frames, so we learn that the kidnapping occurred over a year ago and that in the intervening months, terrible reversals of fortune have befallen the two main players. It’s a series for those who like their murder mysteries with a heavy Scandi-noir feel and a brooding maverick cop at their centre. Vicki Power
Professor T ITV, 9PM
Nobody plays an uptight English neurotic better than Ben Miller, and so this role as a criminologist with OCD fits him like a latex glove. He’s Jasper Tempest, a brilliant Cambridge don who’s called in by a cop (a former pupil played by Emma Naomi) to investigate the case of a serial rapist in the town. The standard procedural format is lifted by giving Tempest a rich backstory and a mother played by Frances de la Tour. VP
Monday
Taken: Hunting the e Sex Traffickers CHANNEL 4, 9PM
With their customary y diligence and tenacity, ty, Peter Beard and Dave e Nath (the team behind nd the Bafta-winning The Murder Detectives) have secured red unprecedented access ss to a dedicated covert police olice unit for this three-part art series. Over three years, ars, they film the team as it
attempts to break up a humantrafficking ring led by Lezlie Davies and Mark Viner, who have been bringing women from Brazil to work in their brothels in and around Cheltenham and laundering money through a variety of vague business enterprises. It is a necessarily painstaking process, with the risk of discovery and flight ever-present, and future episodes promise the expansion of the operation to South America and setbacks aplenty. This is lean, punchy film-making, where none of the officers are attempting to entertain or be “characters”; the focus, quite rightly, ri is on the criminals, their th victims and the operatio operation to bring them to justice. Gabriel Ga Tate
Killing Escobar Escob BBC TWO, 9PM
A grubby business this, but compellingly compellin told: in 1989, Scottish mercenary m Peter McAleese was hired to kill the Colombian Colom drug baron Pablo Escobar. Esco Still terrifying, McAleese tells the story of the botched mission m with insight, candour and a a sprinkling of self-mythology. self-mytho GT
Tuesday
Uprising BBC ONE, 9PM
Directed by Steve McQueen PICK (who brought us the
OF THE Bafta-winning Small Axe WEEK dramas last year) and
James Rogan (who made the Grierson-winning Stephen: The Murder That Changed a Nation, about the murder of Stephen Lawrence), this compelling three-part documentary dives deep into a defining moment in British race relations when a fire at a house party in London’s New Cross, in 1981, led to the deaths of 13 young black people. The question hovering over everything in this opening film is: was the fire, as was widely suspected at the time but never proved, a deliberate act of racially motivated arson? Opening with an evocative series of press photos and headlines, it instantly transports us back to the grim world of the early 1980s. A time when racism was shockingly overt (the interviews, mostly with friends and relatives of those who lost their lives in the fire, give a palpable sense of it) not only on
the streets in the form of the National Front but also within the ranks – as testified by a number of former officers here – of the Metropolitan Police. Continues tomorrow and Thursday. Gerard O’Donovan
Secrets of the Museum BBC TWO, 8PM The V&A was closed during lockdown
but the work of conservation never stops. Meaning that there was plenty of material for this second behind-thescenes series which features a famously fragile Michelangelo wax model, a kimono exhibition and a red Lurex suit donated by Jim Lea of Slade, the quintessence of Glam Rock. GO
Wednesday
Les Dawson: The Lost Tapes ITV, 9PM
This tribute coincides with what would have been Les Dawson’s 90th birthday. His widow, Tracy, and daughter Charlotte, 28, play a central role by commenting on some formerly unseen footage, including a sweet video that Dawson commissioned to welcome newborn Charlotte home from hospital in 1992. The film follows a fairly biographical path, charting Dawson’s origins as a Mancunian lad whose style of mother-in-law comedy was forged in working-class matriarchal culture and explores his rocky path to stardom – he was in his late thirties before he landed a decent TV gig on Jokers Wild. Commentary comes from friends including Barry Cryer, Jimmy Tarbuck and Gloria Hunniford. The new archive material is of little consequence, but the film reminds us what a loss Dawson’s death in 1993 was to his family and to comedy. VP
Hillsong Church: God Goes Viral: Storyville BBC FOUR, 10PM
This documentary investigates a Christian megachurch that’s harnessed the power of social media to gain new followers. Director Nick Aldridge shines a light on church scandals and asks why so many millennials are attracted to this brand of Christianity. VP
Thursday
Diana’s Decades ITV, 9PM
Nick Angel’s three-part series has been a cut above many entries in the endless parade of royal documentaries, in part because of the calibre of its contributors and for finding the sweet spot between the surreality of Diana’s life and her tragic fate. This final part brings us into the 1990s, as the marital split becomes public thanks to the Squidgygate tapes, the Andrew Morton book and televised interviews. Sometimes the straining for contextual profundity can make it borderline absurd (“It was almost like time had caught up with Diana’s ethos,” muses Trisha Goddard over the fall of the Berlin Wall and release of Nelson Mandela), but at least the main contributors have either been in genuine proximity to the Princess (Morton, paparazzi Max Cisotti), or rarely been interviewed before. GT
The South Bank Sky Arts Awards 2021 SKY ARTS, 9PM
Still fighting the good fight, Melvyn Bragg introduces a ceremony from London’s Savoy Hotel to celebrate the arts after a year when their future was under threat yet their importance never greater. Spanning television, pop, dance, visual arts and more, the nominees include singer Dua Lipa, actor Michaela Coel and Douglas Stuart’s novel Shuggie Bain. GT
Friday
Reclaiming Amy BBC TWO, 9PM
There are few worse things than losing a child; but losing a child and being hounded in the press, accused of exploiting and failing her at her time of greatest need, is trauma on another
level. There’s a palpable sadness to this documentary marking the 10th anniversary of singer Amy Winehouse’s death. And defiance, too. “You think you know my daughter. The drugs, the addiction, the destructive relationships. But there was so much more,” says her mother, Janis. As the title suggests, the idea is to dispel the myths that have grown up around Winehouse and her tragically early demise. It’s the centrepiece of a Friday night line-up celebrating Winehouse on BBC Two and Four. GO
Ted Lasso APPLE TV+
A welcome return for Jason Sudeikis’s charming Golden Globe-winning (and now record-breaking Emmynominated) culture clash comedy about an upbeat American sports coach brought to the UK to pep up a failing football team. The 12-part series kicks off with a double bill, followed by a new episode weekly. Coach Lasso (Sudeikis) struggles to find a solution when his new star player suffers “a case of the Ys” (the yips, to you and me). GO