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

Remember Me

9pm, BBC One

Gwyneth Hughes's contemporary ghost story got off to a good start last week but this second episode is even better. It doesn't have the charged, bare presence of the BBC's old ghost stories for Christmas, but compared with most contemporary TV horrors, it's nicely pared down: all lowering mood served up with haunted Yorkshire atmosphere. Old Tom Parfitt (Michael Palin) was centre of intrigue for the first episode but, now he's gone missing, absconded from the hospital, focus falls on the young care worker, Hannah (Jodie Comer), who has become obsessed with finding him. The beleaguered detective on the case, Rob (Mark Addy), isn't interested in hearing theories about Indian ghosts, and brushes off her hunches. But as his investigations bring to light some unknown and increasingly uncanny revelations about Tom's life, he begins to change his mind. The puzzle puzzles; the creepy-jumpy scenes creep and jump; and those brooding landscapes brood. But the best bit is a simple, lovely sequence just following Hannah and her young brother running around Scarborough beachfront on a winter afternoon, two kids full of joy ... until ...

Monday, December 1

Nuts In May

10pm, BBC Four

Bob Servant

10.35pm, BBC One

Mike Leigh is riding high at the pictures again with Mr Turner, providing an excuse to repeat this toe-curling wonder from 1976. Foreshadowing the excruciating suburban satire of Abigail's Party, Roger Sloman and Alison Steadman star as Keith and Candice-Marie, a Croydon couple camping deep in the Dorset countryside. Keith has planned their holiday down to the last detail; but when other campers pitch nearby, with a loud radio and no respect for the Country Code, his carefully wrought plans, not to mention his whole personality, unravel. There's more toe curling, of a slightly different order, on BBC One as Brian Cox (the acting one, as opposed to the floppy physics crush) returns for a short, brisk, second series as blowhard Broughty Ferry businessman Bob Servant. The first series of Neil Forsyth's sitcom followed his campaign in a local by-election. Dusting off that failed referendum, he's ready for his "second coming", firing up his old burger van to get back into the fast food fray. Just don't ask what kind of meat he uses…

Tuesday, December 2

The Missing

9pm, BBC One

Those fake vision sequences last week were a bit of a sneaky red herring to throw at viewers, but the satisfyingly Eurostyle thriller settles back down tonight, and cranks up the pace. Back in 2006, Tony Hughes (James Nesbitt) is left shocked by his actions and, panicking, tries desperately to clean up and cover his tracks at the isolated farmhouse building site owned by the vile Ian Garrett (Ken Stott). Meanwhile, the investigation into their son's abduction is going nowhere, and as events slip further out of their control, it all finally gets too much for Emily (Frances O'Connor). Flashforward to the present and, eight years after the dark night that Tony was last there, the French police have finally been granted permission to search Garrett's unfinished house, and troubled detective Julien Baptiste (Tcheky Karyo) has a hunch about where to look. Meanwhile, he and Tony track down the man they have been searching for, but he'll only talk to them at a price. And, back in flashback, we discover how Julien got his limp.

Wednesday, December 3

Confessions Of A Secretary

9pm, Channel 4

It's the final episode of this simple but effective series, which has charted how life and attitudes have changed in the UK over the last 50 years by examining how things used to be done in particular professions back in the (not always so) good old days. In previous episodes, the confessions of police officers and doctors were sometimes a little shocking. Tonight, though, the testimony of female office workers looking back on the stuff they had to endure on a daily basis two and three decades ago is more depressingly predictable: shabby stories of leers and gropes and indecent proposals that run like the script from some horrendously dreary 1970s blue comedy. The contributors help chart how the introduction of sexual harassment laws and equality legislation gradually changed the face of working life, as the equality wars were fought, more women broke through the glass ceiling and attitudes slowly started to shift.

Thursday, December 4

The Fall

9pm, BBC Two

It's part four of six, and writer-director Allan Cubitt is seriously tightening the screws now: half taut police procedural, half nail-biting cat-and-mouse, this is probably the best single episode of The Fall so far. Feeling violated, but unyielding, Stella Gibson has decreed her hotel room a crime scene and is processing the implications of Spector having trespassed into her personal space, and invaded her very private dream diary - not to mention that in witnessing her confrontation with the drunken Burns, he might also have overheard that they are on to him. Meanwhile, she realises with horror that Spector has also been visiting his surviving victim in hospital in his guise as a therapist. Springing into frantic action, the police finally get him in her sights, and Stella orders intense surveillance. But the best laid plans… Brilliant stuff, with one particularly great hand-over-the-mouth moment, and a new face on the scene: Jamie Dornan has been getting all the headlines, but are you ready for… Hunky Merlin?

Friday, December 5

Karajan's Myth And Magic

7.30pm, BBC Four

The Story Of Funk: One Nation Under A Groove

9pm, BBC Four

Say it loud. Where would we be without BBC Four? In assessing the great service the channel has performed in the field of Friday Night Is Music Night, it's not simply a case of acknowledging that meaningful music coverage is extinct on every other station today. You also have to factor in how niche it is prepared to go.

For evidence, look no further than this Friday, and a night designed to cater to the needs of the tiny classical music-funk crossover community; a proud minority with little to celebrate since 1978, when The Galactic Force Band unleashed its deep groove reworking of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra as the standout track on their epochal Spaced Out Disco LP.

The evening serves up an excellent new feature-length profile of legendary German conductor Herbert Von Karajan, followed directly by a thick, steaming documentary on funk's development in restless 1970s America. It is to be hoped there might be a little more crossing over going on as a result of this scheduling.

With luck, a few Bootsy Collins fans with no previous interest in classical might tune in early and realise that this Karajan was a pretty funky mother, what with his fly sci-fi hairdos, leather gloves and wing-door sports cars; and a few classical snobs might stick around long enough to free their minds and realise the maestro had much in common with James Brown, including a shared philosophy about democracy in a musical collective. (Essentially: it must be stamped out.)

Illustrated with copious footage of the master at work and contributions from many who worked for him ("worked with him" doesn't seem right), the Karajan film covers the dicey area of his Nazi party membership in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s - the consensus is he was never a Nazi, simply an opportunist - and is brilliant on just what made him so brilliant as a conductor.

The best sections, however, are devoted to orchestra members simply telling what it was like working under the charismatic bugger, stories delivered with awe, incredulity and bafflement. Karajan was a pioneer in the cinematic recording of musical performance, and flautist James Galway recalls, in hilarious wonder, how balding orchestra members would turn up for filming sessions only to find themselves being ordered to wear hand-picked wigs for the cameras, to satisfy the conductor's magnificent vanity and sense of style - even though Karajan, acting as his own director, made sure no one ever got a close up except him.

From here, it's into the deep-fried funk platter, which begins by pinpointing the form's big bang as the day in 1967 that Brown went off the soul train rails with Cold Sweat. Sections on Brown, Sly And The Family Stone and the great George Clinton leave you wishing for full nights devoted to each. But with contributions from members of those bands, Earth Wind And Fire, Kool And The Gang, War and many more, it does a fine job of covering the rise and fall of the music in a brisk, eye-popping, ear-worming, squelchy 60 minutes. The archive performance footage is amazing. The stuff gathered from BBC archives for the Genius Of Funk compilation that follows (10pm) isn't shabby either. Another showing for the Prince profile, A Purple Reign (11pm), sends you off to bed, sweating but not cold.

Saturday, December 6

Tomorrow's Worlds: The Unearthly History Of Science Fiction

10pm, BBC Two

This episode of Dominic Sandbrook's series is titled Robots, giving the science fiction nerd in your house all the excuse she needs to push her glasses up her nose and snort, "Pffff, fer cryin' out loud: Roy Batty? I mean everybody knows he's not a robot - he's a blummin' android"; or, "Come on, programme's called Robots and they're doing RoboCop? IT'S A CYBORG, DUDE." Sandbrook begins with Frankenstein's monster (cue Alan Partridge: "He's a type of ZOMBIE") but soon ticks off the classic movie robots, from the slick, iconic Maria of Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis, through Robby, the masterpiece of 1956 design lumbering stylishly around Forbidden Planet, to the brilliant Silent Running 'bots, the bickering Star Wars duo, and various Terminators. Along the way, there's also an opportunity to argue over what classification best fits Cybermen, apart from "Great in the 1960s; pretty crap now." Robomen Rutger Hauer, Peter Weller, Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker are among the interviewees, alongside the splendid cyberpunk guru, William Gibson. There was a time when BBC Two would have put some great robot movies on after this. But they haven't. And there are no cybernauts, either. Pah.