The very best of the week ahead
Today Dance Night BBC Four, from 8pm
The BBC underlines its enduring commitment to dance with three hours of programming around BBC Arts’ UK wide, seven-week long festival Dance Passion. It opens with Dance Passion 2022, as Josie d’Arby and Karim Zeroual introduce highlights from the festival including extracts from Birmingham Royal Ballet’s interpretation of Don Quixote, hip-hop and circus act Simple Cypher performing Roll Up, Roll Up in Plymouth, and dance from Leeds’s Northern School of Contemporary Dance – where Phoenix Dance will be putting on a performance inspired by the life of boxer Jack Johnson, the first African-American world heavyweight champion. At 9pm comes Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra, Wayne Blair and Nel Minchin’s remarkable and moving documentary about the Bangarra Dance Theatre, an indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander group. Brenda Emmanus brings the evening to a close at 10pm with Dance: BBC Introducing Arts, a series of short films from up-and-coming dancers around the themes of identity and isolation. Gabriel Tate
Call the Midwife BBC One, 8pm
After last week’s dramatic cliffhanger, the reckoning: there are casualties aplenty following the train crash, but are any of Poplar’s most familiar faces among them? The fates of Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) and Dr Turner (Stephen McGann) hang in the balance, while the births continue at Nonnatus House. And, as so often, Heidi Thomas’s well-judged script finds hope among the wreckage and light in the darkness as another triumphant series comes to a close. GT
Monday Imagine... Wayne McGregor BBC One, 10.35pm; Wales, 11.05pm; NI, 1.35pm
“His experiments with th the body in space invite us to explore the boundaries of our individual dividual and collective lives and the possibilities of the future,” uture,” says Alan Yentob of tonight’s focus, Wayne ne McGregor, a towering ng figure in British contemporary dance. e. He explores McGregor’s gor’s journey from childhood ood in 1970s Stockport to o being, since 2006, the he resident choreographer her
of The Royal Ballet as well as director of his own 30-year pioneering dance company. Yentob follows him over a few creatively intensive months as the world begins to emerge from the pandemic and McGregor takes on a new role as the first British director at the upcoming Venice Dance Biennale. McGregor also discusses his long-standing interest in exploring the impact of technology on the body, and how he created the choreography for last year’s long-awaited Abba avatar (“Abbatars”) reunion, Voyage. Gerard O’Donovan
Moors Murders: Murders The Witness Channel 4, 9pm
Another delve through the details of some som of the most horrible murders mu ever committed, built around a cache of o letters from serial killers ki Ian Brady and Myra My Hindley to a fellow prisoner who befrien befriended the latter in Holloway. Holl This opener also features a 2003 interview with David Smith, S who witnessed witness one of the murders and called in the polic police. GO
Tuesday
Kate Garraway: Caring for Derek
ITV, 9pm
Just days into the first UK lockdown March 2020, Derek Draper, a former Labour campaign adviser, was taken to hospital suffering from Covid. He spent months in intensive care after suffering multiple organ failure and Kate Garraway: Finding Derek, a film presented by his wife, movingly documented a year in their lives as they coped with the huge disruption his illness caused. Now the Good Morning Britain presenter updates his story with this new film. In April 2021, Draper was released from hospital, but was nowhere near cured. As Garraway says, the virus “devastated him from the top of his head to the tip of his toes”. The ground floor of their house was converted so that Derek could come home and the couple, who have been married for 16 years, were able to celebrate Christmas 2021 together with their two children, Darcey, 15, and Billy, 12. It’s clear, however, there’s a long way to go and he may not make a full recovery, but there are moments of hope in this glimpse inside the reality of the UK’s estimated 1.1million Long Covid sufferers. Veronica Lee
Rigs of Nigg
BBC Four, 9pm
A warm-hearted documentary that recounts how the tiny village of Nigg in Cromarty Firth was chosen as the production base to build massive North Sea oil platforms in the 1970s. Those who were there
Wednesday Mission: Joy: Finding Happiness in Troubled Times
BBC Four, 10pm
The death on Boxing Day of Archbishop Desmond Tutu means that this documentary, made before his death, serves as a warm tribute. It centres on a filmed conversation, in 2015 in India, between the spiritual leaders about happiness, which led to the publication in 2016 of their joint manual, The Book of Joy. Their chat – never seen on film before and moderated by their co-author, US wellness evangelist Douglas Abrams – is intercut with segments outlining their childhoods and filling in the blanks on the turbulent recent histories of South Africa and Tibet that shaped their lives and ideals. Also included are interludes in which researchers talk about the latest scientific findings on happiness and how meditation and performing acts of kindness can yield positive results on the wellness front. Vicki Power
Frayed Sky Max, 10pm
After an under-the-radar start, comedian Sarah Kendall’s Eighties-set comedy-drama returns for a deserved second run. Widow Sammy (Kendall with grim helmet hair) is back in London trying to wrest her house from crooked lawyer Rufus (Robert Webb). More fun is to be had in scenes back in Australia with her car crash family, so let’s hope a reunion’s on the cards. VP
Thursday
The Big Freeze: Winter ’63 Channel 5, 9pm
PICK Some of us may remember OF THE winter 1963 – or the Big WEEK Freeze, as it became
known – when snow began falling on Boxing Day 1962 and barely stopped for 10 weeks. Temperatures plummeted, sports events were cancelled, and rivers froze over in the coldest winter recorded since 1739. In Charlie Clay’s informative and evocative film, TV weatherman John Kettley explains the science behind the event. Clay vividly paints a picture of life during those freezing weeks, uncovering moments of heroism – such as daring helicopter rescues – or when describing the devastating Crewe train crash caused by frozen points that claimed 18 lives. There are flashes of British stoic good humour in first-hand accounts of the Big Freeze from ordinary folk as well as celebrities: record producer Pete Waterman describes what life was like for working-class Britons, while Joanna Lumley recalls being snowed in at her boarding school in Kent and how pupils managed to keep warm. VL
Billy Connolly Does...
Gold, 9pm
Billy Connolly has retired and now lives in Florida, where the warm weather helps to ease his Parkinson’s symptoms; this entertaining seven-part series looks back over his 50-year comedy career and is a mixture of stand-up clips and the Glaswegian’s conversations with director Mike Reilly. VL
Friday
Vikings: Valhalla
Netflix
With the perennially underrated The Last Kingdom coming to an end this year, Netflix tops up its Scandinavian barbarians genre with Vikings: Valhalla. This sequel to the longrunning saga Vikings springs from the unlikely source of Jeb Stuart, writer of Die Hard and The Fugitive. Picking up a century on from the climax of the preceding series, it launches with a Game of Thrones Red Wedding-style bloodbath as English King Æthelred orders the purge of all Vikings in the St Brice’s Day Massacre of 1002. King Cnut ( Keeping Faith’s Bradley Freegard) gathers together an unwieldy coalition of clans to embark upon a revenge expedition. With Christians and Pagans, daggers, axes and warhammers drawn, the venture looks in danger of ending before it has even begun. Prince Harald (Leo Suter) is at the King’s right hand to keep the peace, while enigmatic explorer Leif Eriksson (Sam Corlett) arrives at the camp with his vengeful sister (Frida Gustavsson), his own agenda, the legacy of his father’s murderous history and his own particular set of skills. It holds the attention througha series of violent skirmishes, political intrigue and a splendidly entertaining smörgåsbord of accents. GT
Death in Paradise
BBC One, 9pm
Off all the niche scenarios for murder in Saint-Marie, a chess match has yet to feature – until tonight’s final episode in the series. Neville Parker (Ralf Little) investigates, while a face from the past gives Commissioner Patterson (Don Warrington) an unpleasant surprise. GT