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

Nazi Megastructures

9pm, More4

There was a time when every second documentary appearing on Channel 4 had the word "Nazi" in the title, but you hardly seem to get them anymore. Originally made for the National Geographic channel, spun-off from their regular Megastructures strand, this series is a little stentorian in delivery, but pretty fascinating as it considers those mad, at times uncanny building, engineering and weaponry projects Hitler decreed in the quest for world domination, and the legacy these malevolent creations have had in modern warfare. The first episode considers the biggest: the Atlantic Wall, the vast, dark, concrete defensive barricade that stretched over 3,000 miles from Norway to the Spanish-French border, built by slave labour to repel an Allied invasion of Europe. Years in the building, at a cost of countless Deutschmarks and man-hours, the structure, with its sophisticated reinforcements, guns and eerie bunkers, was the most ambitious fortification project in recent history: so why, when the invasion came, was it breached in under a day?

Monday, October 6

Grantchester

9pm, STV

The continued existence of Downton Abbey means this new period crime show has been unceremoniously elbowed out of its natural habitat. A 1950s-set affair about a handsome, crime-solving young vicar in a bucolic English parish, it's the kind of programme that has been painstakingly genetically engineered to thrive on a Sunday night, after you've had your dinner and overdosed on the special biscuits. A similar situation also applies to the new series of Lewis (starting on Friday), but Grantchester is a slightly different, somewhat duller-of-wit kettle of comfy-cosy crime, its combination of leafy, sunlit murders, suspicious local eccentrics and faintly nonsensical plotting designed to lull you gently toward sleep and pleasant dreams of brown socks and new dentures. Last seen as a bad lot in Happy Valley, James Norton switches gear to play the Sherlock in a cassock, Rev Sidney Chambers, who begins investigating the apparent suicide of a local solicitor. Robson Green co-stars as the harassed salt-of-the-Geordie local police inspector (actually called Geordie) with whom he forms the obligatory unlikely partnership.

Tuesday, October 7

The Human Universe

9pm, BBC Two

It begins with spine-tingling shots of celestial blackness, then glinting coppery light, and then, there, like a new planet - nay, a new god! - framed against this shivering cosmic eternity, a single, lonesome, heroic astronaut. There comes a voice. It is your own. And it is saying this: "Jesus, man, please don't let this be Brian Cox ponced up and posing about dressed as a come-to-bed floppy spaceman for no good reason." And, lo, it is. Coxy's new one is billed as addressing the big questions - "Why are we here", and that - but I'm fairly certain that, by the time we get to the end of the fifth episode, he won't actually have cracked it. In the meantime, we get the patented Cox business: a narration that is three-parts patronising hand-holding ("There is clearly a great gulf between them and us," he explains, pointing at baboons) to one part hard-to-follow physics delivered with a sympathetic smile, framed by Lonely Planet postcard scenes of him striding about good-looking spots in Ethiopia, with a debatable fondness for shots presenting locals regarding him with a mixture of awe and happiness at his very presence.

Wednesday, October 8

The Great British Bake-Off

8pm, BBC One

Richard wins. That's not a completely massive spoiler, by the way, just a prediction. Unless it's Chetna, who has already picked up this year's Golden Cooling Rack for Best Use Of A Pair Of Orange Converse High-Tops In A Continuing Factual Series. Mind you, neither of them might even be in tonight's finale, as the BBC, quite rightly, weren't too keen on showing it to anyone in advance. At the time of writing, then, the four semi-finalists - Richard, Chetna, Luis and Nancy - are all still theoretically in the running, but you'll know by now which of them got chucked off the show in complete disgrace at the end of last week's episode. It was Nancy, wasn't it? Go on, you can tell me. It was Nancy, right? It was Nancy. Tonight, it looks like it will all come down to a blind technical challenge (ingredients, but no instructions), and an epic showstopper to create a piece montée, a decorative, sculptural, sugary, teetering, heart-stopping centrepiece, which Richard wins. Unless it's Luis. Or Chetna. What will we do without them? Hey look, here comes The Apprentice!

Thursday, October 9

Detectorists

10pm, BBC Four

Blue skies, twittering birds, men in fields with metal detectors and slight melancholy, digging up old Matchbox cars: the second episode of Mackenzie Crook's unutterably splendid sitcom is more of the same, but digs a little deeper. Lance (Toby Jones) and Andy (Crook) have been granted access to go detecting on the land owned by the mad lonely farmer with invisible dogs. They are beginning to let themselves hope they might be on the threshold of discovering the fabled funeral barrow of King Sexred of the East Saxons. But they're keen not to let anyone else know about it - so how come a rival pair of detectorists are on their trail? Meanwhile, Lance is "thinking about putting the band back together" ie, asking Andy to accompany him at open mic night in the local pub, to perform the mandolin ballad he's written for his ex. But why hasn't he mentioned her to new girl Sophie?

Friday, October 10

Lewis

9pm, STV

Time works in mysterious ways in Oxford. Morse ran 13 years, during which time it clocked up seven full series and a handful of one-off films. Lewis has been going for eight years now, but has already managed eight series. You get the feeling we might be coming to the end of things now, though - but not just yet. As stalwarts will recall, the last series actually ended with a guilt-wracked Hathaway apparently quitting. As we return, though, it turns out that he's still on the force, while Lewis himself has retired, to concentrate on grumpily building boats in his backyard. Promoted to DI, Hathaway has a new sergeant sidekick (Angela Griffin), but his boss (Rebecca Front) reckons they could do with some experienced help when a neurosurgeon turns up in the woods with a bullet in his brain. Whoever will she call? It's dependably smooth, satisfying stuff, gently paced in lovely locations, undemanding yet absorbing. Shame that ITV still insist in cutting the two-hour stories up into one-hour chunks.

Saturday, October 11

The Code

9pm, BBC Four

Following on the underwhelming period heels of Sweden's Crimes Of Passion, BBC Four's latest Saturday night import makes a break from all the Eurocrime and subtitles. A six-part conspiracy thriller, being shown in the now traditional two-hour double-bill chunks, all the better to slump in front of, The Code hails from Australia, but it demonstrates how far the fall-out from the Scandi-explosion of recent years has drifted.

One of the pleasures of the wave of imported drama that BBC Four has spearheaded has been the basic, almost physical one of simply losing yourself in unaccustomed landscapes; literally, spotting interesting buildings in the backgrounds, washing your brain in other sensations of space and light. The Code, which moves between the city life of Canberra and the red desert harshness of an outback community, ticks this virtual holiday box too. Yet all the Aussie flavour comes wrapped around a decidedly familiar Nordic centre.

Notably, the long shadow of Stieg Larsson's Dragon Tattoo books hangs over the story, which pits another investigative journalist from a hip, alt-media publication up against a powerful and dangerous cabal, with the crucial aid of another troubled computer hacker.

But the influence of other recent hits is equally palpable. That hacker is sporting TV's current affliction of choice, Asperger's, like a more fragile cousin of The Bridge's Saga. Meanwhile, the conspiracy reaches into the Australian government, affording the opportunity for some Borgen-esque business in the corridors of power.

The journalist is Ned Banks (Dan Spielman), a writer for an online magazine, who, in the course of breaking a shabby, leaked exposé on a minister's sex life, stumbles over a clue in the classic tradition: tucked among the dossier of incriminating notes he's been passed by a parliament spin doctor is a single mysterious word, scribbled on a torn-off scrap of paper. A google search reveals it's the name of a far-flung outback village where a curious incident has just occurred: a car accident involving two teenage aboriginal sweethearts. The girl remains missing. The boy has shown up traumatised and covered in her blood.

With the aid of the kids' teacher (Lucy Lawless - yes, the mighty Xena herself, and pretty great) Ned comes into possession of a damaged video from the missing girl's phone, which his damaged-genius hacker brother Jesse (Ashley Zukerman) manages to unscramble. At which point, hell comes down on them, in the shape of black-ops cops, politicians and big pharma.

There's a lot of googling and hacking, which the director jazzes up by having the screens pop up and float around characters while they do it. I still have difficulty finding scenes of people typing hugely exciting, but, by the end of the opening double bill, The Code had generated enough intrigue to pull me back for more.

The first episode in particular is incredibly busy in setting out its stall, and there's not a great deal of nuance. As TV conspiracies go, if The Honourable Woman was like an odd, spacey John le Carré, this is more in the Tom Clancy and Dan Brown mould of being all plot. But it keeps driving forward, powered by a good cast, with Spielman making for a very likeable, unshowy lead.