Damien Love on the best of this week's TV

Poldark

9pm, BBC One

"Tis as we feared, Ross! Fever's rife at Bodmin! They're dropping like flies!" Oooh, by, but it's hard times down in Poldark territory - which means it's happier times tonight for that section of the audience whose favourite moments in the show tend to coincide with Aidan Turner whipping his blouse off.

Poldark is stripping half-naked on the beach by dawn because he must burn his shirt, having just ventured into the dark, fetid pit of sickness and infection that is Bodmin Gaol, on a mission of mercy to aid his imprisoned young worker, Jim.

Elsewhere, amid a hell of a lot of galloping and more brooding than you might think possible, tongues begin to wag as Poldark's pal Doctor Dwight becomes perilously embroiled with that come-hither floozy who's just married one of his other men.

All this pales into insignificance when compared with the real action this week: an epic party sequence, as Ross and Demelza are invited to a ball at Evil George Warleggan's, a hotbed of snobbery and treachery, where Poldark finally wigs out. All in all, an excellent episode.

Monday

Game Of Thrones

9pm, Sky Atlantic

So once again, then, to gentle Westeros, as the biggest thing on TV smashes daintily back for a fifth series.

Last we saw the merry citizens of GoT (and if you're still catching up via box set binges, stop reading now), things were in a perilous state of flux: Charles Dance's magisterial Tywin Lannister had suffered an ignominious end, plugged with a crossbow by his newly exiled anti-hero son Tyrion as he sat on the other throne; young King Joffrey had joffed off, leaving his mother, Cersi, in another right bad mood, and his kid brother Tommen in line for both the throne and marriage to the widowed queen Margaery; Arya Stark had set sail for the city of Braavos, having left The Hound to die OR HAS HE; her sister Sansa had fallen into cahoots with the slippery Littlefinger; weird Stannis Baratheon had turned up at The Wall in time to save the Black Watch from slaughter, for a price; and Daenerys was having just awful trouble with the dragons.

On the plus side, Diana Rigg was happy, which is always a good thing. 

Tuesday

Later… With Jools Holland

10pm, BBC Two

Jools is back and assuming the usual position for another dose of the Laters; we're on series 46 now, if you're counting, but it's still the best at what it does on TV, with nothing broke, and nothing that needs fixing.

Except, of course, the interviews. The new season kicks off with a bit of a coup in the shape of the recently reconstituted Blur. Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon and company are in the studio to perform tracks from their forthcoming album, The Magic Whip, their first together in 16 years, and which, to judge by the tracks that have already been released into the wild, finds them sounding far Blurrier again than probably anyone was expecting.

They're joined by the Malian groove machine (and Albarn favourites) Songhoy Blues, young British folkstress du jour Laura Marling, and indie-rock sorts The Vaccines.

Wednesday

Newzoids/The Delivery Man

9pm/9.30pm, STV

Every few years, ITV decides it would be a wheezer whizz to revive Spitting Image. They last attempted it in 2008 with the CGI version, Headcases, a show that arrived dead in the water, was as cuttingly satirical as a sponge, and sank without trace.

There wasn't much in the way of preview material for this new one - aiming to be topical, episodes are recorded close to transmission - but it will feature impressionists including John Culshaw and Deborah Stephenson providing the voices for the stars of the show: a bunch of 70-odd real, old-school puppets, including David Cameron and Nick Clegg on the Jeremy Kyle show, Charles and Camilla as a Gogglebox couple, Ed Miliband on I'm A Celebrity and the passing likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Beyoncé, Vladimir Putin and, well, whoever else.

It's joined in a Wednesday-Night-Is-Laughter-Night double bill with The Delivery Man, a new sitcom from Green Wing alumni Robert Harley and James Henry, starring Darren Boyd as an ex-policeman turned midwife, plagued by his old cop buddy, Paddy McGuinness.

Thursday (top pick)

The Jinx: The Life And Deaths Of Robert Durst

9pm, Sky Atlantic

Sky's exclusive deal with HBO continues to be the gift that keeps giving. This morbidly mesmerising six-part documentary is not only incredible viewing, it's also one of the most talked-about programmes on TV at the moment: partly because it's so dubiously compelling; partly because of the impact it has had in reigniting a real case; and partly because of the possible ramifications for the filmmakers - who have now been accused of sitting on the vital information they uncovered while making the programme, for the sake of making a splash with it in the show.

At the centre of it all lurks the unforgettable figure of Durst, the 71-year-old heir to a New York real estate fortune: a reclusive billionaire who, over the past 33-years, has been suspected of three murders, and been guilty of a lot of peculiar behaviour, including a spell in which he lived in disguise as a mute old woman.

The Durst case has long been famous in the US, but it's only on the back of The Jinx that is has started making headlines in the UK again, and for those of us who aren't up to speed, the first episode does a valuable job in laying out the history.

Durst first fell under suspicion of murder in 1982, when his wife Kathleen went missing, a disappearance that remains unexplained. It happened again on Christmas Eve 2000, when his friend, a journalist named Susan Berman, whose father had been in the mob, was found killed execution-style in her home in California.

But the story here really begins in 2001, with the discovery of a headless, limbless corpse floating in Galveston Bay, Texas, an incident described in jaw-dropping detail by the cop who had the job of fishing it from the water.

The Galveston trail led eventually to a beat-up rooming house, and the discovery that the victim, an elderly man called Maurice Black, had been friends with a fellow resident, Dorothy Cliner: the mute lady who turned out to be Durst. He finally admitted to killing and dismembering Black, yet managed to get a Texas jury to acquit him of murder, thanks to a head-spinning self-defence plea.

Slowly assembled, with its mix of wealth, weirdness and violence, this grisly business is queasily interesting, like a high-class version of a regular true-crime trashumentary. But it's with the second episode, when Durst himself becomes main interviewee, that The Jinx comes into its own, and moves into another dimension.

Director Andrew Jarecki first tackled the noir wonderland of Durst's story in a fictionalised 2010 movie starring Ryan Gosling, All Good Things. Durst saw that film, apparently liked it, and somehow then agreed to sit for the series of interviews Jarecki builds this series around: some 20 hours in all.

A disconcerting presence, to say the least - slight, twitchy, deadpan and (apparently) astonishingly direct - Durst embodies the point where enigmatic meets eccentric, and the world he offers in his testimony exists somewhere between the universes of David Lynch and the Coen Brothers.

The result is uncomfortably fascinating: a multi-layered, resolutely (perhaps debatably) non-judgemental series that is part-investigative journalism, part-true crime pulp teaser, part-tragedy, part-jet black comedy, part-horror. The series exploded into the headlines due to a now infamous moment in the final episode, when Durst, off-camera, but still wired for sound, apparently makes a mumbled confession to the killings. But the whole thing is riveting. And the story isn't over yet.

Friday

How To Make A Number One Record

9pm, BBC Four

Sadly, tonight's BBC Four music documentary isn't a TV adaption of the KLF's old book, The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way.

But they do have some fine people involved - including Noddy Holder, Bob Stanley and Bill Martin, the man who gave the world Puppet On A String - for a canter through the strange history of the UK No 1 single, and weird phenomena such as one-hit wonders (take another bow, Mr Joe Dolce), and that inexplicable time that Bryan Adams stayed on the top with his Robin Hood song for 87 years.

Along the way, the programme attempts to work out if there is indeed a secret formula for making a No 1, and considers the roles played in the process by art, science, chance, manipulation and a good video.

Stay tuned for One-Hit Wonders At The BBC, including Germany's 1982 smash sensation Trio, with their globe-devouring Da Da Da, Ich Lieb Dich Nicht, Du Liebst Mich Nicht, Aha Aha Aha.

Saturday

Happy Valley

10pm, BBC Three

With Series Two on the horizon, a repeat for writer Sally Wainwright's cop drama, which became a word-of-mouth sensation last year.

The great Sarah Lancashire plays a sergeant on the beat in a depressed West Yorkshire town. We first encounter her as she's trying to persuade a wasted young man not to set himself on fire, during which she offers this handy character synopsis: "I'm Catherine, by the way. I'm 47, I'm divorced, I live with my sister - who's a recovering heroin addict - I have two grown-up children. One dead and one who doesn't speak to me. And a grandson."

She also, as we learn, nurses feelings of guilt and revenge over that dead child, which begin to boil when she becomes involved in a local kidnapping case that spirals out of control. With an ensemble including George Costigan, Siobhan Finneran and Steve Pemberton, it grows into something like a Brit-realist reworking of Fargo. But it's Lancashire who makes it.