TV: Damien Love reveals his pick of the week's TV

Frankie Boyle's Referendum Autopsy

Available from 9pm tonight, BBC iPlayer

Frankie Boyle, who it's safe to say was roughly, more or less, on balance, when you get right down to it, leaning slightly toward the Yes side of things (but also predicting "it won't happen"), staged this one-off live event at Glasgow's Britannia Panopticon just a few days ago, meaning no preview material was available. Assuming that it went ahead, everyone lived to tell the tale, and the cameras weren't all smashed up and the footage seized, the resulting show, produced by Charlie Brooker's Zeppotron, will be going up on the iPlayer from tonight, possibly causing a slight dilemma for anyone planning to boycott everything to do with the Corporation, but also giving them something else to complain about, along the lines of "See: why isn't it being shown on TV, huh, why?" Chewing over the campaigns, the celebs, the twitter, the vote, the result and its repercussions, a mixture of stand-up, review, discussion and audience interaction is promised, as are guests including fellow comedians, pundits, high-profile players and, possibly, wrestlers.

Monday, September 30

Gomorrah

9pm, Sky Atlantic

We're at episode nine of 12 now, and the nastiness that has been simmering for the past few weeks in Naples is about to come foaming up over the sides. With his father languishing in solitary confinement, Genny has stamped his mark as the head of the clan. He has his new mayor in his pocket and, more importantly, he's back doing serious business with their former rival, the Spanish-based religious madman Conte. But not everyone is happy. Brooding bitterly on the edge of the gang, feeling increasingly pushed out, Ciro is about to unleash a plan that will blow the peace apart, using as his pawn the young garage mechanic he's been keeping under his wing. From here on in, the plotting, and the bloodletting, gets almost Shakespearean. It's a real shame that this incredible Italian import is hidden away behind a paywall, as it is by some distance the best thing on TV at the moment - the box set is out at the end of October. Your rental list will thank you for it.

Tuesday, October 1

The Driver

9pm, BBC One

Writer Danny Brocklehurst's drama got off to a decent start last week and he doesn't squander it, delivering a very strong second episode that stokes up the tension and the twists. We begin where we left off: Vince (David Morrissey), the Manchester cabbie who has agreed to do some off-the-books driving work for a local mobster (Colm Meaney), is barrelling through the night with his unreliable pal Col (Ian Hart) in the passenger seat, and a screaming, battered stranger locked in the boot of his car. Their destination turns out to be a derelict spot on the outskirts of town, where there is nothing but ruined factory buildings, and some very deep, dark holes in the ground. From here, Vince attempts to play a double game, trying to do the right thing even while he's doing wrong. But the more he tries to dig himself out, the deeper and deeper he gets sucked in. Brocklehurst has a good feel here for mixing stock, pulpy crime scenes with believable consequences, all soaked in cold sweat and paranoia.

Wednesday, October 2

Oh! You Pretty Things

9pm, BBC Four

"Kevin played me the songs. They didn't have all the words yet, but I could hear the violins and everything. He asked if I could come up with a new look to go with it, so I just kind of went away and thought… And then the dungarees happened." That's designer Debbie Williams, looking back on the raggle-taggle tsunami of baggy denims worn with gutties and no socks she unleashed across the UK in the summer of 1982, when Kevin Rowland asked her to design a wardrobe to accompany Dexys Midnight Runners' Too-Rye-Ay album. As this three-part series on the relationship between pop and clobber ends with a lively dissection of the 1980s, Rowland himself is also on hand, to discuss his band's earlier street-gang look, derived from Marlon Brando and On The Waterfront. Elsewhere, Steve Strange talks about the Blitz club and Bowie, as usual; Duran Duran (above) honk away like horses in lipstick for ages; Jazzie B dissects the funky dread of Soul II Soul; and there's an unexpectedly long section devoted to OMD, which manages not even to mention how they ripped off the utilitarian anti-fashion of Kraftwerk, but compensates by including a fantastic old TV ad for Man At C&A.

Thursday, October 3

Detectorists

Thursday, 10pm, BBC Four

Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, just when everything's at its most wretched and pointless, the universe will shift slightly, put this thing together with that other thing, and suddenly deliver something you weren't expecting, had never even considered, but which, now it's there in front of you, strikes you as so right, so inevitable and so mysteriously preordained you can't help thinking - maybe things aren't that bad. I mean, we live in a world with all that other stuff going on, yes. But also a world where there's still the possibility of something like this.

It can be a face, a landscape, a record. But I got that rare feeling most recently during the opening seconds of Detectorists, as I realised that, somehow, I had never before even contemplated that there might be a sitcom starring Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones as a pair of men with metal detectors, wandering muttering through empty fields in the morning sun. And in the same moment understood that, of course: it had to happen, and of course it would be tremendous.

Academic work has probably been attempted on what makes the ideal comedy double act - equations dissecting Stan and Ollie, Eric and Ernie, Vladimir and Estragon, Pete and Dud, Vic and Bob - but whatever it is, Crook and Jones have it. Put them together, and they just look funny, in both senses of the phrase. Crook is like a scarecrow drawn by a pirate, Jones like a turnip made of gnomes. A lonely field is their ideal setting and, even if Detectorists consisted of nothing but scenes of them shuffling a few steps, heads bent to the earth as they sweep their machines, straining to catch a blip in their headphones, then stopping to dig, being disappointed about what they find, and shuffling on again, it would be worth watching.

And, in fact, a lot of Detectorists is just that same splendid sequence, over and over again. If there is a catchphrase, it is "What you got?" - the nervous, hopeful, slightly jealous question this pair, Andy (Crook) and Lance (Jones), call repeatedly back and forth whenever one of their detectors pings and the trowel comes out.

But the series, written and directed by Crook, has much more going on, albeit quietly. For one thing, there's the constant, chummy, jibing banter the duo share. For another, there is a pair of rival detectorists who look like Simon and Garfunkel, hiding in the long grass. And for another, there's a gentle but determined probing of the psychology that can drive us obsessively into our hobbies, the way we wrap ourselves in things to blot out the world and make the time pass, while we're waiting to stumble over the pot of gold we must surely find one day.

Crook binds this all up with a great feel for relationships, between Andy and Lance, between Andy and his partner Becky (the infallible Rachael Stirling), and between Andy, Lance and Sophie (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), a bright young student stranger who turns up in their field one day, suspiciously interested in them.

More surprising, though, is his visual sense as director, layering in odd silent gags (by day, Andy works a series of menial jobs whose physical aspects - pushing floor cleaners and lawnmowers - all mirror his metal detecting) and displaying an unshowy, folksy, quite rapturous feel for landscape. Above all, Detectorists just looks great, and feels lovely to be inside. It's a gem covered in dirt, a strange little thing, strangely beautiful.

Saturday, October 5

Enlightened

10pm, Sky Atlantic

Laura Dern's astonishing little programme continues with an episode in which she barely has a cameo. As the double bill that opened this final series last week laid out, Amy (Dern) is on a new holy war to bring down the company she works for. This week, though, we take a brief hiatus from her campaign, to catch up instead with her ex-husband, Levi (a great performance by Luke Wilson), a cynical, dissipated, dissolute, disillusioned alcoholic and drug addict, pretty close to hitting rock bottom. Last we saw of Levi, Amy had somehow persuaded him to try and get clean by visiting the same, expensive, New Age retreat in Hawaii where she first found her enlightenment, following lots of hugs in group therapy, and a close encounter with a turtle in the ocean. Levi's experience of the place, however, does not quite match up with the picture of Nirvana that Amy has been painting for anyone who will listen. And there's no sign of that turtle.

Saturday, October 5

Doctor Who

8.30pm, BBC One

Half-past eight!? You'll need to watch this in your pyjamas! It would be hard (hopefully) for this series to get much worse than the fan-girl tickling tedium of whatever last week's non-story was supposed to be about, and this week's is indeed a slight step back in the right direction, at least for a while. The good bit comes early, when the Tardis pitches up on the moon in 2045, to find a deserted base filled with corpses, and the crew of a desperate mission from Earth, armed with nukes. There's some good creeping about, and some excellent spider-monsters that will seriously terrify younger viewers (if there are any left). It soon reverts to type for some hand-wringing, tear-sodden overinflated emotional angst that doesn't make any sense at the end, mind you. Capaldi still rocks, though. Maybe he can fly back in time to the old BBC Television Centre and try to find some decent storylines for his second series.