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

The Mekong River With Sue Perkins

8pm, BBC One

Or, as I like to call it: In The Timeless Spirit Of Alan Partridge, The Department Of Two Random Concepts You Thought You Would Never Have To Deal With At One And The Same Time Brings You The Mekong River With Sue Perkins. In her favour, even La Perky seems surprised that she's been asked to front a four-part travelogue on the great South East Asian waterway that runs through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Burma: "I guess Michael Palin was busy." Anyway, a cheque is a cheque, and off she goes on an exhausting 3000-mile jaunt up "The Mother Of Water", beginning in Vietnam, where she is encouraged to try the ropes by the prawn-fishing community. From here, into Cambodia, where finally you get the chance to discover what happens when a presenter from The Great British Bake-Off meets a survivor of Pol Pot's Year Zero. "These are the best noodles ever!" she says, elsewhere.

Monday, November 10

Toast Of London

10.50pm, Channel 4

Blake's Seven fans alert! In tonight's odyssey through the acting underground of London, Steven Toast (Matt Berry) encounters the fabled veteran theatrical producer Duncan Clench, played by none other than the mighty Paul Darrow, aka Kerr Avon himself, the great, scenery-destroying, black-gloved anti-hero who provided the dark heart of the BBC's old space opera. Thanks to the stool-pigeonry of his archrival Ray Purchase, Toast has been landed with a tax bill of a quarter of a million pounds, and so has agreed to take a part in Clench's upcoming stage version of Calendar Girls. But when tragedy strikes, the show is left without a director. Channelling his inner Hitchcock, Toast boldly steps up to the mark, and reckons that a dictatorial approach is the only way to proceed with his cast of polite ladies: "I intend to treat these people like cattle." Good nonsense all round, with a splendid cameo from another unexpected face. It's only your blummin' Bergerac, that's all.

Tuesday, November 11

Penelope Keith's Hidden Villages

9pm, More4

Sue Perkins is busy on her mission to Burma, and so More4 have had to turn to Penelope Keith for this sleepy, comfy tour of picturesque, out-of-the-way British hamlets; although, to be fair, on balance Penelope Keith makes far more sense in a show about dottering around in nice wee villages than Sue Perkins does in a show about going by boat through the killing fields of Cambodia. It's not all cream teas and thatched roofs in the sunlight, though - while hoovering up the picture postcard qualities of the places she visits, Keith has points to make about traditions under threat, and the issues and changes being faced by such small communities. It's mostly just nice, though. She begins tonight in East Anglia, arriving just in time for the regatta on the Norfolk Broads, and taking to the air (by biplane, of course) to get an aerial view of the splendidly named village of Little Snoring.

Wednesday, November 12

The Newsroom

10pm, Sky Atlantic

Returning for a short, six-part final series, Aaron Sorkin's glossy HBO drama has been admirable in terms of the subject it has attempted to take on: essentially, how traditional news media (in this case, a nightly American TV news show) functions in an age in which it is being squeezed on the one side by the new social media explosion, and on the other by an age-old corporate mentality that encourages fads, gimmicks and gossip if it adds up to ratings and a healthy bottom line. Commendable, too, is Sorkin's determination to keep the rat-a-tat speed and rhythms of 1930s Hollywood alive in the machinegun pace of the dialogue exchanges. Too often, though, The Newsroom is torpedoed by soft sentimentality, a misjudged sense of its own cuteness and a style that can verge on being smug, pompous hectoring. Still, I'll miss it. As ever, the series works by reassessing the recent past: we're in 2013 now, and the Boston Marathon bombings are unfolding. The story is "developing fast" but, stung by recent events, the News Night team decide to err on the side of caution, and actually establish some of the facts before reporting them.

Thursday, November 13

The Fall

Thursday, 9pm, BBC Two

When the first series of the Belfast-set serial-killer drama The Fall ended last year, it didn't feel like a series ending at all. Rather, after a short, sinister run of five arguable, yet undeniably gripping episodes, the programme just stopped, fading out at a point that didn't feel particularly like a natural climax or cliff-hanger, suggesting instead that the production - like the police murder hunt it depicts ­- had simply suddenly run out of funds, or ideas about how best to go on.

As it returns, it still feels like a single series broken somewhat senselessly in two. The plot picks up exactly where we left off: 10 days have passed since the unknown killer, Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan), sensing things growing hotter than he likes, left Northern Ireland for a bolthole in Scotland, after making a final phone call to the detective on his trail, Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson), declaring he was going to vanish, forever.

If it's hard to pinpoint a single good reason for there being a year-long hiatus between episodes five and six, however, it's also undeniable that the programme has benefitted from its time offscreen. I remember it as icy, unsettling and, at least for a primetime thriller, both thoughtful and challenging in the way it served up the dubious standard fare of the serial-killer genre - sexual violence against women - while taking a slight step back and asking us why we kept watching. But, while I was gripped, I don't remember last year's episodes getting me by the throat like this new batch.

It's the same programme, but everything seems intensified - that minimal electronic score by David Holmes feels more insidious; even the silence, in the long dialogue-free sequences that mark this week's episode, screams louder. What has changed is that the writer who created the show, Allan Cubitt, has now also taken over direction, and aided by Ruairi O'Brien, the brilliant cinematographer on both series, The Fall now creeps, prowls and pauses in a subtly different way, its sharp focus drawn to slightly different things.

Dornan's performance remains the most obviously unsettling element: a sexily handsome young father who can be charming, recognisable and likeable one moment, and then a night monster the next. (As a job of acting, it is of a different order to everything else he's done.) The recurring terror of The Fall is Spector's invasion of his victims' homes, the way he strikes where you feel safest, and Cubitt constructs the worst yet this week, in a scene that finds Dornan simultaneously at his most charming and skin-crawling.

As before, Cubitt crosscuts often between Spector and Gibson, paralleling the pair, but there are signs it is Gibson that is beginning to interest him far more. This is a superb performance by Anderson, strangely distant yet strikingly direct, and Cubitt cues the entire series around her mood: apparently glacial, chill, but with hairline cracks in the surface, and something burning and bruised deep down.

Next week, Cubitt twists the knife with a development that sees Spector, a therapist by trade, assigned to help one of his surviving victims through her trauma. It's a particularly provocative plot convolution, barely credible and highly questionable, yet the programme is so tightly controlled it works. At heart, The Fall is still just another cops and monsters spook show, a hooky, spine-tingling melodrama. But as a mainstream crime thriller, it is remarkable for its balance of urgency, sadness and dread. I've rarely felt so tense watching TV.

Friday, November 14

Children In Need

7.30pm, BBC One

It's that time again as Terry Wogan and Tess Daly kick off the annual charity juggernaut, hoping to replicate the success of last year's event, which raised a whopping £31 million. To help out, they have chums on hand including the fabled Tom and Jerry themselves, starring in a specially created animation alongside cartoon versions of famous BBC bods including El Tel, David Attenborough and Alan Sugar, hopefully standing on a chair screaming, but probably not. Elsewhere, there's the traditional EastEnders sketch, in which a haunted Ian Beale will be visited by the ghosts of characters from the soap's past; a performance by Gareth Malone's all-star choir; and a Strictly children's special, featuring the return of The Bruce. Meanwhile, there's also the little matter of some kind of Doctor Who contribution that was still being kept under wraps at the time of writing: could be a trailer for Christmas, could be a small special episode-ette, but the internet seems to hope it will feature Benedict Cumberbatch in a Sherlock Who crossover. But that's the internet for you.

Saturday, November 15

It Was Alright In The 1970s

9pm, Channel 4

It seems like quite a while since we saw much of Matt Lucas on TV and so, while it's not quite the return of George Dawes, it's nice to have him back if only as narrator of this not entirely heavyweight two-part look back to the TV of the 1970s: a foreign country, where they did things differently.

Basically a traditional Channel 4 clips and talking heads show with a twist, the first episode concentrates on light entertainment pleasure and leisure, including outrageous sex jokes in pre-watershed sitcoms, the lost art of smoking fags on prime-time panel shows and pipes on kids TV, and giving away dogs as prizes. People who made the programmes, and those who watched them, look back in wonder - but not as much as the younger participants, who missed the 1970s altogether and find some of the values exhibited in some of the clips just a little outside the current norm.