The very best of the week ahead
Today
Gentleman Jack BBC One, 9pm
The second series of Sally Wainwright’s romp continues to be even better than the first, with Suranne Jones on excellent form as the 1830s lesbian diarist and landowner Anne Lister of Shibden Hall in Yorkshire. This episode starts with a heated showdown between Lister and her ex-lover Marianna Lawton (Lydia Leonard), which careens between comedy and melodrama in an exquisite script (complete with occasional knowing looks to camera by Jones). Marianna still wants to see Anne, but she says “let’s just be friends”. Back at Shibden, Anne’s secret wife, the heiress Ann Walker (Sophie Rundle), is now firmly part of the household, to the consternation of her family, who are trying to marry her off to a gentleman caller. Wainwright wittily weaves the historical backdrop into the racy narrative: Marianna’s husband burbles about “the body politic” in the drawing room, while Anne attends to the body erotic upstairs. But trouble threatens as a businessman, having been bettered in a deal by Anne, tries to threaten her “unusual arrangement”. It’s great fun. Veronica Lee
Grace ITV, 8pm; UTV, 10.15pm
The adaptations of Peter James’s crime novels continue, with John Simm as the troubled detective Roy Grace. He and his sidekick DS Branson (Richie Campbell) investigate the murder of a socialite, the wife of prominent entrepreneur Kit Bishop (Arthur Darvill). The Bishops seem to have had a charmed life but as Grace digs deeper, all is not what it seems. VL
Monday
DI Ray ITV, 9pm
Airing across the next xt four evenings, Maya Sondhi’s accomplished ed policier doubles as an n incisive analysis of cultural and national BritishAsian identity, starring Parminder Nagra as the titular DI Rachita Ray. Having demonstrated her compassion, insight, pragmatism and courage in an off-duty showdown with a troubled, knife-wielding man, Ray earns a move from response to homicide. Here, her first case is the “culturally specific homicide” of one Imran Aziz. Uncertain whether her promotion is due to ability or ethnicity, she is already tired of microaggressions, being mistaken for another Asian copper or hearing casual references to “these types”. The case exacerbates her concerns as she queries lazy assumptions around honour killings (Aziz, a Muslim, has been dating the daughter of the Kapoors, a Hindu family), fam under pressure from a boss (Gemma Whelan) keen to close t the case amid mounting tensions. ten Instead, she uncovers a web of rivalries, criminal crim fronts and sibling resentments. resen A solid ITV police procedural pr is given extra heft by Nagra’s nuanced performance and an obvious investment in the subject matter. Ga Gabriel Tate
Davina M McCall: Sex, Mind and the Menopause Channel Channe 4, 9pm Following Followi last year’s well-rec received mythbusting one-off, Davina McCall and producer Kate Muir reconvene to study the impact of the menopause on the mind, with symptoms ranging from memory loss to brain fog. Could the answer lie in hormone therapy? GT
Tuesday Jay Blades: No Place Like Home
Channel 5, 9pm
The Repair Shop’s Jay Blades heads to Channel 5 for this history-lite series looking at who trod his manor before he did. Blades goes walkabout in east London, visiting old haunts and meeting historians and characters who deliver nuggets of social history. It’s a Who Do You Think You Are? of Hackney. Blades revisits his first home, where he and his mother were taken in by her uncle. In a neighbourhood now noticeably gentrified, Blades learns that the street was among the first to endure German bombing during the First World War. He meets a hairdresser who was friends with the Krays, and a Jewish retiree who fought fascists in Ridley Road. But Blades’s mind is blown by a visit to a Unitarian church whose parishioners had once owned slaves from the Caribbean lands of his forefathers. Dispensing history in tidbits like this, and interspersing it with Blades’s reminiscences, makes the topics accessible and personal, if not particularly rigorous. The show’s biggest asset, however, is Blades, an engaging character whose openness only endears him more to audiences. Vicki Power
Life After Life
BBC Two, 9pm
Life takes a rum turn for dear Ursula (Thomasin McKenzie) in this beguiling adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s weepie. Tonight her endeavours to become the perfect housewife go unappreciated, and a jaunt to Germany pre-war goes from dreamy to distressing. VP
Wednesday
Kicking Off: The Rise and Fall of the Super League BBC Two, 9.30pm
Even for a sport long mired in disgrace amid enduring controversies over club ownership, the attempt by a dozen of Europe’s biggest (read: richest) clubs to launch a European Super League last year was a new low, albeit one ameliorated by the schadenfreude of its rapid public collapse. This film brings together experts and interested parties, from Gary Lineker to Premier League CEO Richard Masters, to retell the sorry saga. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that an unholy union of American hedge-fund owners, Russian oligarchs, European industrial tycoons and Gulf royals might be out of touch with the concerns of the average football fan, but the speed with which a grassroots campaign to counter the initiative was assembled is heartening. Less so has been the absence of any real willpower for footballing authorities to give the sport the cleanout it requires. Might lasting lessons be learnt? Don’t bet on it. GT
Great British History Hunters More4, 9pm
This absorbing series follows the experts at the British Museum as they chase up curious metal-detecting discoveries in Shropshire and the West Country. The latter assignment is given an exciting twist by the prospect of possible criminal involvement. GT
Thursday
The Staircase Sky Atlantic, from 9pm
“Truth? What is that?” says the quote from Pontius Pilate in this terrific real-life crime drama, which keeps us guessing on what is fact and what is convenient fiction in the story of the novelist Michael Peterson (Colin Firth). On 9 December, 2001, Peterson’s second wife, Kathleen (Toni Collette), a business executive, was found dead at the foot of the stairs at their home in North Carolina. Peterson was convicted, and served a reduced sentence when, following a mistrial and under a quirk of the US legal system, he was able to make a plea of manslaughter without an admission of guilt. But was he really innocent, and the victim of a witch hunt, as he still claims? Director Antonio Campos jumps between time-frames as he tells the story, not just of the crime but the Petersons’ marriage and the family’s shifting views concerning his guilt and possible motive. The show was adapted from a 2004 docuseries, and the first three episodes are airing tonight – you’ll want to binge them. VL
Paul Merson: A Walk Through My Life
BBC Two, 8pm
The former Arsenal footballer, who has become a mental health advocate since battling his gambling and alcohol addictions, reflects on his life and the importance of faith as he takes a walk in the Yorkshire countryside. He offers some poignant insights into how the child ultimately makes the man. VL
Friday The Terror: Infamy BBC Two, 9pm and 9.50pm
The US anthology horror series, that impressed when it hit the BBC last year, returns. Taking inspiration from
Japanese horror movie hits such as The Ring, it’s set around the internment of Japanese citizens in America during the Second World War. It begins in the canneries of Terminal Island in California (where immigrant fishermen settled in the 1920s and 1930s), in the run up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. When a moment of passion between Chester (Derek Mio), the son of Japanese immigrants, and his Mexican girlfriend Luz (Cristina Rodlo) results in pregnancy, their request for a “remedy” unleashes a series of sinister events that older members of the community put down to ancient spirits that crossed the ocean with them from Japan. Chester prefers to view this as superstition – until a chance encounter with a stranger makes him begin to change his mind. Gerard O’Donovan
The Other One BBC One, 9.30pm
Holly Walsh’s sparkling sitcom about estranged half-sisters Cathy (Ellie White) and Cat (Lauren Socha), who discover a third sibling after their father’s death, returns. Mothers, Marilyn (Siobhan Finneran) and Tess (Rebecca Front) react to the existence of “another other woman”. GO