The very best of the week ahead
Today The Ipcress File ITV, 9pm
The opening titles of this PICK Len Deighton adaptation OF THE are a touch misleading in WEEK their careful homage to the
1965 version that helped make a star of Michael Caine: the typography recalls the paranoid espionage thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s; the music takes its cues from John Barry; and the new incarnation of Harry Palmer ( Gangs of London’s Joe Cole) appears in regulation vest and thick-rimmed NHS specs, making a pot of coffee for a young woman. But from that moment, John Hodge’s screenplay gives us the origin story of Harry Palmer, spy. Arrested for handling contraband between West and East Berlin, he is sentenced to eight years in military prison while his wife pleads for a divorce. When a British nuclear scientist vanishes, Tom Hollander’s spymaster Major Dalby, impressed by Palmer’s chutzpah, approaches him hoping to exploit Palmer’s shady contacts to locate the boffin. Cole plays it wry and is softlyspoken, while Lucy Boynton looks a good match as his handler Jean in a confident, entertaining hour of cross and double-cross that bodes well for both the next five weeks. Gabriel Tate
Servant of the People Channel 4, 10.35pm
Quite unbelievably, Volodymyr Zelensky played the President of Ukraine four years before becoming the President of Ukraine. Channel 4 is tonight showing the first three episodes of his comedy series, in which Zelensky stars as a teacher whose tirade against government corruption goes viral, landing him in the top seat. Earlier, at 6.45pm, is Zelenskyy: The Man Who Took on Putin, charting his rise se from comedian and actor to wartime me leader. GT
Monday
This Our House
ITV, 9pm
ITV trots out its favourite genre, the suburban thriller, this four-parter er based on Louise Candlish’s 2018 page-turner. ner. It opens with a fantastic hook: Fi Lawson (Tuppence Middleton) returns home from work to
discover other people moving into her house. Fi’s soon-to-be ex-husband, Bram ( Line of Duty’s Martin Compston), and their two sons are gone and the whole place has been stripped of their possessions. The action flashes back to several months previously, when Fi and Bram’s marriage collapsed, which begins to give us a flavour of what’s happened. Middleton shines in the lead as the tightly wound F Fi, juggling all the balls and aspiring to a life of middle-class perfection with w her kitchen island and accessorised acce outfits. Compston is flirtatious flir (and Scottish) as the hapless Bram, careering from one bad decision to the next, but kind of lo lovable with it. Rupert Penry-Jones joins join later as the suave antidote to Bra Bram, but is he? Jumping between time frames fr keeps viewers off-balance, and C Candlish’s clever plotting means you yo won’t anticipate the next development.
Vicki Power
winning team behind Murdered by My Father – fictionalises the gruelling working conditions at distribution centres (in 2018 Amazon UK was accused of this practice). Aimee-Ffion Edwards stars as management trainee Megan who is forced to bully staff to improve their rates of picking products. VP
Tuesday The Witchfinder BBC Two, 10pm
This terrific six-part comedy drama is set in 1645, in the middle of the English Civil War and at the height of fears about famine, plague and witchcraft. Comedian Tim Key is Gideon Bannister, an incompetent witchfinder mocked by his more successful peers, who has a stroke of luck when he hears that England’s Witchfinder General needs a new right-hand man. Bannister wants to impress the boss by personally delivering “witch and pig-killer” Thomasine Gooch (Daisy May Cooper) to him at the assizes in Chelmsford. What follows is an odd-couple road trip across East Anglia as the uncouth Gooch
outsmarts the pompous Bannister. It ignores historical accuracy with slyly funny anachronisms and is packed with gags, both verbal and visual. The ensemble cast includes Jessica Hynes, Reece Shearsmith, Julian Barratt, Ricky Tomlinson, Rosie Cavaliero and Cariad Lloyd. All episodes are available on the iPlayer from today. Veronica Lee
The Martin Lewis Money Show: Live
ITV, 8pm
Martin Lewis’s savvy cost-of-living financial advice is never more necessary – nor more timely. Top of the agenda for this special show is perhaps the most pressing money concern for UK families now – how to make savings on domestic fuel bills. VL
Wednesday Writing with Fire: Storyville
BBC Four, 10pm
According to India’s caste system, Dalits are considered among the lowest in society and treated as “untouchables”. So when, 20 years ago, newspaper Khabar Lahariya was founded and run entirely by Dalit women, it was expected to fail. This inspiring, Oscar-nominated documentary follows the paper’s extraordinary team of journalists over five years as they make the shift from print to digital, all while risking their lives to hold the powerful to account in a country where religious fundamentalism is on the rise and patriarchal systems remain entrenched. The opening scenes set the jarring tone for the rest of the film, as we see chief reporter Meera Devi use a smartphone to film her interview with a local woman who calmly describes how she was gang-raped on six different days in a single month – and how the police refused to investigate. “We don’t trust anyone but you,” the woman’s husband tells Devi. “Khabar Lahariya is our only hope.” Gerard O’Donovan
Mary Berry’s Fantastic Feasts
BBC One, 8pm
The doyenne of British cookery helps three friends from Cardiff throw a thank-you party for a local hero. They can barely cook a boiled egg but with Dame Mary behind them, it’s not long before they’re rustling up a fine afternoon tea. GO
Thursday My Brilliant Friend Sky Atlantic, 9pm
Season three of the masterful screen adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Given it’s been almost two years since it last aired, a quick recap: it’s the 1970s and Lenu’s (Margherita Mazzucco) novel about her torrid friendship with Lila (Gaia Girace) has just been published to much fanfare in literary circles. Back home in Naples, its frank discussion of female desire has scandalised the neighbourhood. As the series opens, Lenu is engaged to the vanilla Pietro (Matteo Cecchi) but drawn to the alluring Nino Sarratore (Francesco Serpico), who’s just popped into her life again. The dialogue is fairly sparse, allowing the voice-over to bring the punch of the book’s prose into the piece, but much of the characters’ feelings are conveyed without words in scenes beautifully realised by director Daniele Luchetti, the Italian auteur who’s new to the series. Lila is missing from episode one; it focuses on Lenu’s attempt to forge an identity among Milan’s intelligentsia, constrained by her gender and by her impoverished background now she’s operating in bourgeois circles. But the spell cast by Lenu’s childhood friends still has her in its embrace. VP
Secrets of the Spies
BritBox
This gripping new series asks former spies and historians to lift the lid on intelligence work, conveying just how dangerous and thrilling it can be. VP
Friday Grantchester ITV, 9pm
The seventh series of the whodunit begins in the hot summer of 1959, with the sultry temperatures driving
Reverend Will Davenport (Tom Brittney) into throes of passion in rapid fashion. A chance encounter with the mysterious, flighty young Maya (Ellora Torchia) sees him falling head over heels in love (before complications leave him in another existential crisis of faith), while his new lodger Geordie Keating (Robson Green) is licking his wounds after being kicked out by long-suffering Cathy (Kacey Ainsworth). However, it’s not long before there’s a suspicious death to distract them all, when the body of a man is found in the grounds of a manor house. His sisters and long-estranged lover are all distressed, and it looks like a simple accident; Geordie’s officious new boss seems neither to want Will’s help nor Geordie’s involvement. It’s another neat and tidy policier with just enough darkness to anchor it. GT
The Snoopy Show Apple TV+
All six episodes in the second series of this charming revival are released today, a welcome injection of joy, imagination and retro animation that only occasionally misses the existential melancholy of the beagle’s hangdog owner, but is nonetheless a lugubrious delight.