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

The Fall

10.30pm, BBC Two

With the second series of Allan Cubitt's Northern Ireland-set serial killer thriller arriving next month, a handy repeat of series one begins with a double bill tonight.

In a performance that's intriguingly distant and increasingly weird, Gillian Anderson stars as DSI Stella Gibson, a Met officer called from London to Belfast, to oversee a stalled murder investigation.

We learn the killer's identity early: Paul Spector (Jamie Doran), a bereavement counsellor, whose progress we follow in parallel with Gibson's.

And it's here The Fall gets truly disquieting: we first encounter Spector as the black masked killer, preying horrendously on women; but in his daily life as a young father, he is disconcertingly charming.

To begin with. One of the most nagging British crime dramas of recent years, it ventures into unsettling and arguably dubious territory, on one hand condemning media representations of and fascination with violence against women, while on the other lingering over the same, in its depiction of Spector's crimes.

But while slightly awkward, it is undeniably, icily gripping, with moments to leave you tense and squirming, and two fascinating lead performances.

Monday

Intruders

9pm, BBC Two

Given how Americans value British TV for its Britishness, you have to wonder why BBC America persists in making slightly cheap-looking faux-American series like this, a supernatural thriller whose most uncanny aspect is the way they've forced John Simm into an American accent.

He's pretty good at it. But, for anyone who makes a point of catching whatever he does, his very John Simmness makes it sound phony, which has the curious side-effect of making the genuine American actors (like Mira Sorvino, playing his wife) sound phony too.

Opening with a double-bill, Simm plays an ex-LA cop turned writer, who stumbles onto a world of weird when his lawyer wife, Amy, goes missing.

There's pedigree behind the camera, including X-Files/Final Destination writer Glen Morgan and Blair Witch director Eduardo Sanchez, and there are good old-fashioned spooky serial ideas in play: secret societies, the secret of immortality and a very creepy little girl, effectively played by 10-year-old Millie Brown.

But while the show labours hard to generate dour, dark mood, it could do with a lighter touch and more oomph in selling all the complete nonsense.

Tuesday (Main Event)

The Missing

10.35pm, BBC One

It is summer 2006, and in Frankfurt it seems a miracle is happening.

Orchestrated by the sheer will of returned-from-exile captain Zinedine Zidane, the French football team has transformed from a shapeless shambles into a unit that is beginning to look as though it might go all the way in the World Cup.

They have already trounced Spain. Tonight, they face the world champions, Brazil, and - mon dieu! - defeat them.

Back in France, gathered around 30 million TV sets, a nation explodes. In the small town of Chalons du Bois, the patrons packing a tiny bar erupt in a throng of chanting, jumping and kissing.

Caught in the joyful crush of bodies, a holidaying Brit, Tony Hughes (James Nesbitt), smiles around in recognition, and then his smile fades.

One second before, his five-year-old-son, Olly, was holding his hand. Now, his hand is empty. Olly is nowhere in sight. Just gone.

Tony's panicking moment of sick, rising dread lies at the core of The Missing, an eight-part drama by writers Harry and Jack Williams, brothers who have specialised in comedy until now.

Shuffling between the search for Olly in 2006 and the present day, with the child still missing and only Tony - a haggard, obsessed figure - left looking for him, the series has already drawn attention for stirring echoes of the Madeleine McCann case and the unimaginable experience of her parents, as they have been feasted upon by the media spotlight, while fighting to keep that spotlight on their plight, as the rest of the world gradually moves on and turns away.

Those shadows are there, of course, and to some extent the Williams' script attempts to respect them.

However, it would be wrong to approach the series as if it were a documentary, or even a particularly serious-minded dramatic investigation, designed to leave us with some new understanding of an issue.

At heart, The Missing is simply another mainstream thriller, out to entertain by dabbling in things that spook us, and asking us to wonder ... Whodunit?

That much becomes clear as the script begins dealing out shadowy suspects like Cluedo cards.

Above all, the show presents more evidence of the strong hold the critical success of European longform mystery imports like The Bridge and The Killing still exerts, joining The Fall and Broadchurch as another example of how the influence has played out here.

It's more flagrant than most: a Euro-copy actually set in Europe, with your actual foreign languages and everything. Even the theme song has that little Nordic touch.

How it holds up will depend on your appetite for plots for which coincidence, twists and implausibility are the driving motors.

Mine is pretty high, if it is delivered with aplomb, and The Missing is handsomely mounted, with a good sense of how Tony and his wife, Emily (Frances O'Connor), find themselves shifting from tourists to helpless strangers in a strange land.

Nesbitt is on committed form. But the performance to cherish is that by veteran French actor Tcheky Karyo, who plays the detective who first handled the case in 2006 and, although retired, agrees to help look into it anew when Tony turns up in Chalons du Bois again in 2014, claiming he has a new lead.

Karyo looks a bruiser, but has a wonderfully light touch, while suggesting a steel core.

His retired old detective has taken up beekeeping as a hobby, a mischievous nod Sherlock Holmes fans will appreciate. It's that kind of fiction; real life is something else.

Wednesday

Spider House

9pm, BBC Four

So, basically, if you really don't like spiders, don't watch this. Seriously. For the rest of us, this nature documentary on our hairy, eight-legged friends, part of BBC Four's ongoing Halloween-gothic season, is endlessly fascinating. Presenters Alice Roberts and her entomologist chum Tim Cockerill oversee things as an abandoned house is given over to a vast infestation of spiders, who are allowed to do as they will, allowing us to see what they really get up to in the nooks and crannies of our own homes. While the slightly arachnophobic Roberts shudders at the prospect of spending a night in the place with the spiders alone, Cockerill, a true arachnophile, talks us through the myriad wonders of their astonishing web-building, fly-catching, jumping, biting and mating: look out for the "nursery" scenes of loads of wee baby spiderlings taking their first shaky steps outside of the egg-case, awww. Most amazing of all is the early sequence devoted to what happens when spiders get flushed down a drain. Dudes can walk on water, people.

Thursday

Detectorists

10pm, BBC Four

I hope to see Peter Capaldi continuing as Dr Who for a good many years to come; but when he does finally regenerate, how about if The Doctor splits into two people who wander around together, and we get Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones to play him/them?

Just a thought. Meanwhile, it's the penultimate episode of Crook's gem-like sitcom, and a melancholy air has settled over things.

Following last week's fallouts, misunderstandings and inadvertent betrayals, Andy (Crook) is left all by himself, split up with both his detecting compadre, Lance (Toby Jones), and his girlfriend, Becky (Rachael Stirling, owner of TV's most fantastic chuckle).

Bereft, slightly baffled and unable to work the television on his own, Andy reckons the time might have come to give up metal detecting for good.

Meanwhile, Lance has no-one to discuss University Challenge with; the DMDC is on the verge of disbanding; and their evil archrivals, The Antiquisearchers, are closing in on their special fields.

Surely it can't all end like this? A beautiful thing, made slightly more so by that music by Johnny Flynn and Dan Michaelson.

Friday

Goth At The BBC

10pm, BBC Four

It's Friday night, it's Halloween and, ergo, it's Halloween music night!

Continuing BBC Four's rummage through all things gothic, this splendid archive compilation of the backcombed, black-clad, lipstick-toting and occasionally flour-dusted post-punk brigade is an hour of top-notch entertainment, boasting some great bands, some absolutely unbelievably god-awful bands, and some bands that eerily manage to be just hilariously great and unbelievably god-awful at the same time.

Among the undeniably mighty are Siouxsie & The Banshees, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds and PJ Harvey.

Beneath the very bottom of the barrel lurk Specimen, Fields Of The Nephilim and Sex Gang Children.

In between, prepare for a bracing and hilarious turn by Bauhaus, with Peter Murphy giving it total scary-acting pelters through their splendidly daft skeletal-dub anthem Bela Lugosi's Dead, and The Sisters Of Mercy (Mk. II) in full oiled-up pomp performing Lucretia My Reflection in the dark majestic cathedral that was the Top Of The Pops studio circa 1987. Elsewhere, while tapping your toes to The Cure and punching your fist to Killing Joke, get ready to debate whether Strawberry Switchblade actually count as goth in any way, while conceding that it's great to see them on telly, whatever the excuse.

Saturday

Frankenstein And The Vampyre: A Dark And Stormy Night

9pm, BBC Two

There are cybermen on Doctor Who tonight (8.15pm, BBC One), but as it's Halloween weekend, the highlight has to be this new documentary on the events one June evening in 1816 in the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva: the night the modern horror story was born.

As candles flickered and an abnormal storm broke across the waters outside, Lord Byron came up with the idea of a "ghost story challenge" to pass the time, asking the guests staying with him to each write a scary piece.

Byron and his poetic pal Percy Bysshe Shelley produced their own phantom fragments, but were outclassed by their company: Byron's young doctor John Polidori, who came up with The Vampyre, sparking off the bloodsucker craze that would lead to Dracula and every vampire tale since; and Shelley's 19-year-old fiancée, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who began the tale that would eventually become Frankenstein.

Writers, historians and sci-horror geeks gather to marvel at how this one single night could have had such a significant impact on our culture.