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

Congo Calling: An African Orchestra In Britain

8pm, BBC Four

Twenty years ago in Kinshasa, against the backdrop of poverty and violence that blights the Democratic Republic of Congo, an unemployed airline pilot by the name of Armand Diangienda began putting together a band largely made up of self-taught amateur church musicians. To begin, they were 12 people sharing instruments or building their own from scrap materials; today, there are over 100 members, making up a full orchestra and choir that has performed around the world as the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste. This joyous film follows them on their debut UK tour, performing in Manchester and, rousingly, at London's Royal Festival Hall. In between, comes a potted history of the orchestra and pointers to its future, as members reveal their aspirations: Johnny Balongi, a bassoonist and composer, speaks passionately of forging a new tradition of African classical music. Along the way, there's a crammed itinerary of rehearsals, collaborations, other performances and, importantly, sightseeing, with memorable moments at Old Trafford and aboard the London Eye. Wherever they go, it seems, music happens.

Monday, November 17

Dancing Cheek To Cheek: An Intimate History Of Dance

9pm, BBC Four

He was a cheeky Cockney welder who fought his way out the gutter through sweat and a talent for dance, like Jennifer Beals without the erotic sweater. But the vortex created by his fast little feet stirred up a time paradox by which, no matter where or when he ever goes, it will always be Bromley circa 1949: hence that dazzled wonder in his ration-book eyes whenever he sees the packed exotic freezers of Farmfoods. She was an Oxbridge posh historian who had worked for years at maintaining a saucy lisp while wearing cheeky clasps, all the better for churning out endless documentaries about royal things. Now it's finally happened. The BBC has gone mad and put Len Goodman and Lucy Worsley together. Their three-part series on 400 years of British dance starts off with its development across the 17th and 18th centuries, as the idea of men and women moving in rhythm in public went from being a bawdy moral danger to an essential aspect of high society ritual. It's all etiquette, power, repression and sexual frisson, but the best bits are when Len and Lucy finally stop talking and get jiggy on the dancefloor: a weird inverted mishmash of My Fair Lady, Funny Face, Strictly and Simon Schama's deepest unspoken fantasies.

Tuesday, November 18

Secrets Of The Castle

9pm, BBC Two

Back in 1997, a group of splendid, largely French maniacs began an experimental, educational building project in the heart of Burgundy. Their mission: to build an entire medieval castle, using only materials, techniques and construction methods available in the 13th century. They estimated it would take around 25 years to complete this Guedelon Castle, so, relatively speaking, they're on the home straight now, with a completion date looming sometime in the early 2020s. For this series, the BBC's experts at pretending they're living in the past, Ruth Goodman, Tom Pinfold and Peter Ginn (The Victorian Farm, etc) don smocks and muck in to help. You may have marvelled at old castles in passing, but getting up close to the construction process brings on an entirely new level of appreciation, as masons quarry up sandstone, then shape it, and then hoist the blocks into place, all by hand. Meanwhile, Goodman considers their living accommodation - a state of the art hovel - and considers the best way to store foodstuffs. Where can you get a grain arc at short notice? A must for Game Of Thrones fans, and anyone who likes to wave a sword at the weekend.

Wednesday, November 19

Confessions Of A Copper

10pm, Channel 4

This two-part documentary series has a simple idea, and is all the better for it: veterans of a vital profession look back and tell stories about the way things used to be done, before all the rules, health and safety regulations and public investigations. Get ready to shudder next week as GPs relive the good old days. First, though, it's the police, with eight officers recalling experiences on the force from the 1960s to the 1980s. Their anecdotes are the real-life stuff that fed Life On Mars and there is perhaps nothing here you didn't already know or suspect; all the same, there's something jaw-dropping about hearing them reel off how they used to plant and manipulate evidence and otherwise stitch-up suspects as a matter of routine. The frank recollections as fleshed out with (and contrasted against) evocative archive footage drawn from public information films and news reports. But it's the conversational tone that director James House elicits that is the key element, all the more so as the stories gets darker, with female officers describing the grinding sexism they faced on a daily basis from their colleagues, and the tales of violence on the job growing harsher.

Thursday, November 20

The Fall

9pm, BBC Two

It's weird, The Fall. Take a step back, and you can see all the clichés of this kind of crime drama: notably tonight the one that dictates that, even though she's been right about absolutely everything else so far while they've all be wrong, lead detective Stella Gibson's superiors will still insist on interfering and doubting and holding her back and telling her she can't possibly be right. But, while you're actually watching it, it just grips like a clammy vice. As the episode begins, Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) is still inside the house of Rose, the woman who can identify him from nine years earlier. A few hours later, when Rose doesn't arrive for their scheduled interview, Stella (a great Gillian Anderson) begins to sense what has happened, and her own guilt in bringing it about. Elsewhere, there's skin-crawling stuff as Spector is assigned as therapist to one of his own victims, and tries to get rid of Katie (Aisling Franciosi), the teenage neighbour on his trail. Meanwhile, finally, Stella gets a break in the case.

Friday, November 21

Kenny Rogers: Cards On The Table

9pm, BBC Four

Whether or not you're a fan of his kind of country, there's no denying the drive that propelled a poor young white boy from Texas to the silver-bearded superstar whose velvety growl on songs such as The Gambler helped notch up over 120 million album sales. Rogers sits down for an extensive interview in this profile of his career. The early years are the most interesting: he got his start in the 1960s as a member of the ever-changing folk-pop collective The New Christy Minstrels, at that period when, thanks to the protest movement and Bob Dylan, folk was shifting boundaries, hence Rogers briefly becoming a psychedelic pin-up when his second band, The First Edition, scored a hit with their Dude-favourite single, Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In). The meat of it, though, is in his gazillion-selling glory years of the 1970s and 1980s, with friends such as Lionel Richie revealing what makes him tick. Kenny Rogers knows a lot about photography and is an awfully good tennis player, you know. It's followed by the new archive compilation Country Kings At The BBC (10pm), which features footage of Jerry Lee Lewis; ergo it is the best thing on telly tonight.

Saturday, November 22

Tomorrow's Worlds: The Unearthly History Of Science Fiction

9.45pm, BBC Two

Since October, the British Film Institute has been rolling out a splendid season celebrating science fiction on screen - a genre that has ranged from optimistically daft silent shorts like 1902's A Trip To The Moon through to Christopher Nolan's pan-galactic weepie, Interstellar, with the awesome slab of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey floating somewhere in-between, untouchable and sniggering.

The BFI's season is called Days Of Fear And Wonder, but watching the sections devoted to sci-fi on British television, I can't help thinking Days Of Future Past might be a better title. As part of the event, the BFI has scoured the BBC's vaults to release on DVD a wave of scrupulously restored archive programmes that, save for feverishly traded, washed-out bootlegs, have gone largely unseen since their broadcast decades ago.

Last month came Red Shift, a story adapted by cult author Alan Garner for Play For Today in 1978, which gives the lie to the kneejerk shorthand that these days instantly associates that old strand with gritty social realism. A piercing, impressionistic folk sci-fi that sets three parallel narratives echoing across 1,000 years in the same leafy, bloody corner of Britain, it's ambitious, elusive, time-slipping, mind-bending.

Over the past few weeks, I've been investigating the seven discs of another superb DVD set, due for release later this month: Out Of The Unknown, gathering together the surviving 20 episodes of a legendary, questing anthology that ran from 1965-71. Mixing literary adaptations with original screenplays, the series drew from wildly divergent writers, EM Forster to Isaac Asimov, by way of JG Ballard and Nigel Kneale, and the dramas are a revelation: variously stark, sly, unsettling, visionary and shaky, sometimes unexpectedly moving, sometimes outright barking.

Picking three standouts, 1965's excellent Stranger In The Family suggests David Cronenberg's Scanners, 16 years early; 1966's adaptation of Forster's 1909 story The Machine Stops (which could easily be titled The Internet Dies) is striking for its prescience and strange, mournful seriousness; 1971's To Lay A Ghost is a weird, psychosexual ghost story, jaw-dropping in its murky incorrectness. The latter wouldn't get made today, because of outrageously dubious aspects that would draw (justified) complaints.

Watching the rest of these hard, chewy, challenging stories, though, you realise there is simply nothing like this being attempted on TV today - the nearest we have are the parables of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, an honourable, flawed, lonely exception. Popcorn science fiction is everywhere in our revenge of the nerds era. But what strikes you is the probing, grown-up nature of these lost programmes: the refusal to hold the audience's hand; the trust that the audience doesn't want its hand held.

Which brings me, sadly, to Tomorrow's Worlds. This four-part series by the personable historian Dominic Sandbrook is billed as a landmark history of science fiction, but becomes instead simply a hurried ticking off all the best-known sci-fi movie and TV blockbusters. As he rattles through, Sandbrook has time only to mention their most obvious, well-known aspects.

There is shockingly little consideration of science fiction's dense, pulpy literary heritage. You have to wonder who it's aimed at: sci-fi fans will learn little, and be asked to think less. The future ain't what it used to be.