The very best of the week ahead
Sunday I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!
ITV, 9pm
Ant and Dec head back to Australia after two years bivouacking at Gwrych Castle in Wales. No doubt Matt Hancock’s shock decision to take part in the show will give the voting public an opportunity to indicate exactly how popular the Tories are right now, although the other contestants will count themselves lucky if, as seems likely, most of the Bushtucker Trials head his way. Other than that, former rugby international Mike Tindall – the first ever member of the Royal family to head into the jungle – is the year’s most unexpected presence, alongside popstar Boy George (the highest-paid contestant ever with a £500,000 fee), Lioness Jill Scott, radio presenter Chris Moyles, Loose Women’s Charlene White, and others. Gerard O’Donovan
Dangerous Liaisons Lionsgate+
Harriet Warner’s six-part adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s classic novel is a raunchy period drama similar to Stephen Frears’s 1988 hit film, which starred Glenn Close and Michelle Pfeiffer, though it’s not quite so vicious. Alice Englert, Nicholas Denton and Lesley Manville star. GO
Monday Royal Mob Sky History, 9pm
The four favourite grandchildren of Queen Victoria, the Hesse sisters, each married into one of the great royal houses of 19th-century Europe. This four-part docu-drama follows them as they navigate the petty rivalries of monarchs and cousins – rivalries that would lead to the First World War. In the first episode, Princess Victoria Hesse (Josie Dunn) is due to marry Prince Louis of Battenberg (Forbes Masson), whose line will eventually lead to King Charles III. Her sisters Elisabeth (Phoebe Marshall) and Alix (Kat Ronney), meanwhile, are to marry into the Russian royal family, against the wishes of their formidable grandmother (Betty Spencer, aka Michele Dotrice).
Stephen Kelly
Italia 90: When Football Changed Forever
Channel 4, 9pm
This week’s episode follows the undercover cops who were tasked with infiltrating England’s hooligan firms in the hope of neutralising them before the World Cup began. SK
Tuesday Mariupol: The People’s Story
BBC One, 9pm
While news bulletins have taken care to show the human as well as geopolitical impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the cumulative effect of an hour’s worth of personal testimony is considerable in this Panorama special. The words are those of the residents of Mariupol, a once-thriving city in eastern Ukraine whose population of 430,000 has dropped to fewer than 80,000 following Russia’s besiegement. From an anaesthetist to a teacher, engineer and local television presenter, the accounts are both immensely personal and unified, describing the cycle of shock, defiance, then fear as the bombs started to fall. Comfortable lives are upended and families are torn apart as some join the resistance while others seek safety in the west of the country or elsewhere in Europe. “People were scared of both leaving and staying,” says one. “It was a choice of two ways of being killed.” Dealing with dead bodies becomes at once commonplace and impossible to fully process. But perhaps most heartrending are the children whose innocent doodling now features tanks and guns, while their parents try to cling to an ever-fading optimism as the war rages on. Gabriel Tate
Between the Covers
BBC Two, 7pm
Graham Norton, Amanda Abbington, JJ Chalmers and Alex Jones (of The One Show) join Sara Cox to launch the fifth series of this light but entertaining book show. Benjamin Myers’s The Perfect Golden Circle and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (each week will feature an entry from past Booker Prize shortlists) are the first titles discussed. GT
Wednesday
The Crown Netflix
The recent death of Queen Elizabeth II (and the consequent accession of King Charles III) has led to contentious timing for the fifth series of The Crown. It has already attracted criticism, from Judi Dench and John Major among others, for its erroneous approach to history – one scene in which Dominic West’s Prince Charles lobbies Major (Jonny Lee Miller in a wig) to force his mother’s abdication feels like a particular overreach. Picking up during the early 1990s, the Queen, played with a guarded vulnerability by Imelda Staunton, is once again facing questions of relevance. To make matters worse, the failing marriages of her children, most notably Charles’s to Diana (Elizabeth Debicki), continue to chip away at the monarchy’s reputation. West feels too suave, too movie-star handsome to play the future king, but Debicki is strikingly transcendent as Diana, channelling both her mannerisms and ineffable charisma. Later episodes focus on Yeltsin, the Al Fayeds and Panorama, in what is a solid continuation for the royal drama: one that is at its best when delicately exploring the inner lives of unknowable people, rather than relying on the cheap sensationalism of fabricated drama. SK
Fifa Uncovered Netflix
Featuring interviews with key figures and insiders – including the disgraced former president of Fifa, Sepp Blatter – this extraordinary series is a fourpart chronicle of Fifa’s astonishing, and downright appalling, history of corruption. Blatter himself is coy, but there are more than enough candid recollections of World Cups being bought and sold. Its release a week before the Qatar World Cup – which has been plagued by reports of modern slavery, rights abuses and concerns for the safety of visiting LGBT fans – is damning. SK
Thursday The English BBC Two, 9pm
The title of Hugo Blick’s drama refers to the term that Native Americans gave to all immigrants to the New World; we’re in 1890s Oklahoma and Pawnee scout Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer) has been released from US army service and is returning to his ancestral home to stake a claim. On the way he meets Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt), an Englishwoman who is also travelling north, with the rather more pointed intention of taking revenge against the man who killed her son. The bloody, modern Western, written and directed by Blick (The Honourable Woman), is cinematic in its scope, beautifully shot by Arnau Valls Colomer and has some understated humour, even if the American characters are universally painted in shades of awfulness, with the gruff Whipp the only one with a heart. In a starry cast that includes Stephen Rea and Rafe Spall, Ciarán Hinds plays a blinder in the opener as a hotel owner who does unspeakable things to Locke – but he soon learns that there’s more to the grief-stricken woman than he thought. Episodes will be broadcast weekly, but are also available as an iPlayer box set from today. Veronica Lee
The Secret Genius of Modern Life BBC Two, 8pm
Hannah Fry looks at how technology has transformed modern life for the better. She begins with the humble bank card, and discovers how the card’s magnetic stripe (soon to be replaced by embedded chips) has its origins in the secretive world of the CIA. The card’s complex technology – explained in typically jaunty fashion by the mathematician – really does make it a “plastic fantastic” victory of innovation. VL
Friday
Mammals
Amazon Prime Video
Anyone familiar with Sky TV drama Britannia will know that writer Jez Butterworth (who also wrote the Olivier Award-winning play Jerusalem) treats narrative formulae and genre tropes with the same contempt on screen as he does on stage. While staying in a cottage on a Cornish babymoon next door to Actual Tom Jones (naturally), top chef Jamie (James Corden, returning to acting and genuinely excellent) discovers that his wife, Amandine (Melia Kreiling), is hiding a secret. At the same time, their lives are hit by a devastating event.
Jamie’s sister Lue (Sally Hawkins), meanwhile, is disengaged, while her husband, Jeff (Colin Morgan), immerses himself in his work as a lecturer on reproductive habits in the natural world (note the title). Ostensibly a darkly romantic comedydrama, Mammals is stripped of any sense of moral judgment and instead injected with surprise at every turn, from Jamie trying to piece together their lives to the surrealism of Lue’s imaginary world. The occasional elements of magic realism culminate in the series’s last scene which is both hilarious and bizarre, while presenting a fascinating conundrum for Butterworth, should he decide to make the second series that this memorable six-parter merits. GT
Unreported World Channel 4, 7.30pm
Anja Popp travels to rural Guatemala to reveal the heartbreaking plight of young girls in an area with appalling high rates of sexual violence and underage pregnancy. Sexual-health caseworker Carmelina Chocooj is one of the extraordinary individuals attempting to bring change and hope in the face of institutional corruption and communal silence. GT