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

Remember Me

9pm, BBC One

He's not a lumberjack. And he's not okay.

If you saw Michael Palin promenading around in his full, vigorous Python pomp once more for the reunion shows earlier this year, it might take some readjustment to accept him as Tom, the self-declared "vulnerable old man" at the centre of the three-part ghost story Remember Me.

When asked, Tom always gives his age as "80-odd". In reality, Palin is 71-odd but, being Michael Palin, still has that preternatural boyishness: there are fleeting moments in the first episode when he is filmed through the window of a car moving along gloomy Yorkshire roads, and he suddenly looks about 49, and more than able, should circumstances dictate, to still come dancing up to you and slap you in the face with a fish.

This, though, is kind of perfect, because old Tom is not quite what he is pretending to be. We learn this in the opening sequence. It is early morning, and Tom is in the house where he lives alone (well... almost alone), faking up a scene he hopes will get him out of there, arranging himself in a heap at the foot of his stairs, so that, when his neighbour pops around, it looks as though he has fallen.

One call to social services later, and he is off, happy to have hustled his way out of his house and into a local care home.

Seasoned to the ways of sly old devils, Alison (Rebekah Staton), the social worker assigned to his case, suspects he's not so entirely helpless - particularly when she notices he already has his suitcase packed, ready to go. She would be more suspicious yet if she knew his suitcase is actually empty.

Tom is very keen not to bring anything out of the house with him. And with good reason. Because when Alison reveals she lifted a photograph from his mantelpiece for him to keep as a memento, things go very bad indeed.

Written by Gwyneth Hughes, who did a commendable job of completing Charles Dickens's Edwin Drood for the BBC in 2012, Remember Me is an immediately intriguing haunted house story, and constantly good fun, even though no one in it is having much fun at all. Or, at least, no one who is still alive.

They could do with turning the sound effects down a little but, by recent BBC standards, this stuff is fairly restrained.

Director Ashley Pearce raises as many goosebumps simply by staring at drab, weird British landscapes as night comes on as from things suddenly going bump in the night.

It's admirable, in the gore-spattered era of The Walking Dead, to encounter a supernatural thriller whose chief weapon is a drippy tap.

Mind you, some of those bumps are pretty sinister too. And there are moments concerning a bright bundle on an empty beach that combine a faint hint of the old what-the-hell-is-that sensation found in the BBC's brilliant 1968 adaptation of Whistle And I'll Come To You with the more recent creepouts found in the Japanese Ring movies.

It's daft, of course, but, if you are willing to go with it and be spooked, it's just the ticket for dark Sunday nights.

Palin is terrific. Watching him sitting alone in his little Yorkshire living room left me hoping he might do more drama of a different sort soon: if the BBC could get him together with his old pal Alan Bennett, it could really be something.

Monday, November 24

Skint

9pm, Channel 4

Another week, another piece of primetime poverty porn from Channel 4. The channel's notorious Benefits Street generated all the headlines earlier this year but, in truth, that series didn't do much that the first series of Skint hadn't already done a year before: visit a hard-pressed place, round up people with not much cash and not too much hope, and then stare at them as they go through their snappily edited difficulties with poverty, addiction and crime to the strains of a patronising narration and incidental music left over from Come Dine With Me. This second series, however, was filmed after the Benefits Street furore broke and, forewarned, the residents of the area it had selected for study this time - East Marsh in Grimsby - were up in arms, protesting the programme's intentions. As a result, this series treads more carefully. But if you really want to see a portrait of a place, a community and their (our) problems, seek out Ruth Carslaw's notionally similar, infinitely superior 2009 documentary project The Estate, a brilliant and affecting series filmed over a year in Glasgow's Sighthill.

Tuesday, November 25

The Real Tom Thumb: History's Smallest Superstar

9pm, BBC Four

Michael Grade knows where the bodies are buried in TV. As a result, now he's made the splendid decision to reinvent himself as a man who presents documentaries about arcane music hall history, he is given carte blanche to make his films as long as he damn well pleases. Thus this new one: a feature-length portrait of Charles Stratton, the 31-inch-tall performer better known under his stage name, General Tom Thumb. Born in Connecticut in 1838, Stratton was "discovered" aged four by showbiz impresario PT Barnum, and his act - a combination of costumes, songs, gags and impressions - made him arguably the first global superstar. By the time of his death, aged only 45, he had made and squandered a fortune and performed to over 50 million people worldwide, including Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria. Following Stratton's trail from wintry New England to the UK, Grade considers his career and its context aided by the thoughts of disabled actors today. Rather than a tale of simple exploitation, Stratton's story is revealed as a slightly more complex one, of a man who took his chance to make an extraordinary life for himself, against the odds.

Wednesday, November 26

Confessions Of A GP

10pm, Channel 4

The second film in this series isn't as immediately arresting as last week's Confessions Of A Copper, but in some respects it feels closer, if only because more of us will spend time sitting alone in small rooms with our doctors than with police officers. It's the same drill: veterans of the trade look back on the way things used to be done, in intimate interviews oddly reminiscent of being in the GP's surgery. In the old days, the consensus runs, doctors could do no wrong, and commanded a distant demi-god status, with few questions asked about their diagnoses, the quantity of drugs they were allowed to carry, or their ability to literally impose life or death decisions, particularly when it came to areas like women's access to contraception. That has faded in the light of the Harold Shipman case, a new regime of bureaucracy and a general rise in patients' feelings of entitlement over the NHS. Among the interviewees, Dr Howard Martin recalls how and why he was charged with murdering three terminally ill patients in 2005.

Thursday, November 27

The Fall

9pm, BBC Two

I said this last week, but I'll say it again. Looked at rationally, The Fall is fairly stuffed with some right old nonsense: there's even a scene tonight featuring someone hiding in a bedroom wardrobe while other people keep coming to the door that plays like a black parody of a Brian Rix farce. While you're actually sitting watching it, though, trying to remember to breathe, it's the most sinisterly creepy experience to be had on TV today. Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson, being great) now has a name and a face for her prime suspect. She seems to be getting closer all the time to catching Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan, still pretending 50 Shades Of 9 1/2 Weeks will never happen). But he still drifts just beyond her grasp - and she doesn't realise how close he, in turn, is getting to her. Meanwhile, Spector comes to a new arrangement with his teenage fan, Katie, who seems to imagine they are some sick, shabby Bonnie and Clyde. Elsewhere, Stella has an absolutely mental moment with her pathologist pal, Reed Smith (Archie Panjabi).

Friday, November 28

Play It Loud: The Story Of The Marshall Amp

10pm, BBC Four

As is the case every fifth Friday, there are a lot of repeats of documentaries about Pink Floyd on BBC Four tonight. Smack in the middle, though, comes this new muso-nerd-heaven film on the evolution of the most iconic black box in rrrawk: the crunching combo first devised by London drummer and music shop owner Jim Marshall in the 1960s, when local young guitarists like Pete Townshend demanded a sound that would make their guitars as loud as the drums. Townshend, Lemmy, Slash and members of Deep Purple and Status Quo line up alongside legends of a different sort (Joe Brown, The Tremeloes' Brian Poole and the late veteran PA designer Charlie Watkins) to recall how Marshalls changed music, and pay heartfelt tribute to the man who was behind the stacks that were behind them on stage. Due respect, of course, is also paid to Spinal Tap and Nigel Tufnel's legendary "one louder" Marshall - a gag that, ironically, helped save the company from financial ruin in the 1980s.

Saturday, November 29

Tomorrow's Worlds:

The Unearthly History Of Science Fiction

9.45pm, BBC Two

Dominic Sandbrook's series is more a handy hitchhiker's guide around the better-known landmarks of science fiction, but it's a friendly and handsomely put together one. For the second episode, he takes as his theme Invasion, considering the long history of stories that imagine Earth being visited by unfriendly (or are they?) aliens: from HG Wells's Victorian-era War Of The Worlds and Orson Welles's notorious 1938 radio adaptation, through 1950s classics The Thing From Another World and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, to ET, Independence Day and District 9, by way of Professor Quatermass, Midwich Cuckoos and Daleks in London. Sandbrook considers what such stories reveal about the anxieties of the ages that produced them, with help from a fine cast including head Dr Who honcho Steven Moffat and ex-Doc David Tennant, Close Encounters man Richard Dreyfuss and directors John Landis, John Carpenter and Roland Emmerich.