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

Olive Kitteridge

9pm, Sky Atlantic

The latest HBO import, and it's another stunner, although it stuns in a slow, sad way.

This brief series would be the best thing on TV this week if only for the cast: the great Frances McDormand leads as the prickling Olive, joined by Richard Jenkins as her patient husband; elsewhere come passing faces like Peter Mullan and Bill Murray - the kind of actors who you could watch just sitting around trying to decide on a pizza.

Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection by Elizabeth Strout, it begins in the early 2000s, when we first encounter Olive in her seventies, in a startling moment; then it flips back to late 1970s, and her life as a misanthropic maths teacher in Maine, and her seemingly unlikely marriage with her upbeat pharmacist husband.

Attuned to the mundane, soulful and poetic, it's a portrait, essentially, peeling back the layers of a crabby, complicated, depressed, almost unlikeable character; trying to get close to someone who really doesn't want you getting close to her.

Monday, December 15

Darts Night

9pm, BBC Four

It's all arrows and oches on BBC Four tonight, beginning with Bullseyes And Beer: When Darts Hit Britain, a dependably fine documentary from the Timeshift strand, examining how the game broke out from the pub to become a lucrative, sweaty TV fixture in the 1970s and 1980s.

The film explores the history of darts and considers its surprising ability to cross borders of class and gender, but the focus is on the world championship finals that gripped the nation in 1980, 1983 and 1990, with help from the legend who featured in all three, Eric Bristow.

Phil "The Power" Taylor, John "Stoneface" Lowe and Bobby "Dazzler" George are also interviewed and there are contributions from Martin "The Teeth" Amis.

It's followed by Arrows (10pm), director John Samson's excellent short film, following Bristow in his pomp around late-70s Britain. Completing the triple-top, a repeat for the documentary Alex Higgins: The People's Champion at 11.35pm. Except he's snooker. Close enough for BBC Four though.

Tuesday, December 16

Black Mirror: White Christmas

9pm, Channel 4

It would be good if, in the way that the BBC has made an annual tradition of its festive Doctor Who, Channel 4 put on a Christmas special for Charlie Brooker's dyspeptic anthology series every December.

Finding Black Mirror lodged among the schedules like a chicken bone in the throat at this time of year, it suddenly becomes clear that Christmas is the perfect setting for Brooker's programme.

The black mirrors of Black Mirror are, of course, the interconnected, fingerprint-smeared web of screens that surround us, to the point we barely notice them any more, or how our dim reflections get lost in them - phone, computer, television.

And if Christmas isn't all about getting your hands on the latest essential piece of digital life-enhancement, well, what is it about?

Here, too, Black Mirror fits the season.

Brooker's what-if stories explore our relationship with a technology that is evolving faster than our psychology, and a culture racing to commoditise our most private needs and feelings. (Indeed, the "Black Mirror" title is already quaint; in these new stories, the screens have practically disappeared.) These are modern-day morality tales of the unexpected, but sometimes the moralising, and the sentimentality that accompanies it, gets a little much.

The worst episodes can strike a slightly hectoring, sermonising tone. At Christmas, though, we're more susceptible to that stuff; just ask Frank Capra.

This feature-length special, a selection box of three stories, finds the show at its best and worst.

One of the great things about Black Mirror is that it gives excellent actors the chance to do something slightly outside the bounds TV usually sets them.

As a bonus present, this one offers John Hamm, the mad man himself, delivering a magnetic performance that begins all cocksure strength and easy charm, then chips away to reveal something smaller and much seedier. (Perhaps not so very far from Don Draper after all, then.)

Hamm leads two stories, which come framed inside a larger piece that sets him in a two-hander with Rafe Spall, workers at some strange, isolated, snowbound station, sharing a claustrophobic Christmas dinner.

The separate pieces work together cleverly; ideas salted in the first and second mesh and deliver the third. Taken individually, though, the first is best.

Set, as ever, a hair's breadth into the future, Brooker extrapolates on the possibilities of Google Glass to propose "Z-Eyes": internet-enabled contact lens implants that act as both browser screen and camera for the wearer.

From this, he spins a twisted cyber Cyrano de Bergerac, with Hamm as an online pick-up guru, secretly guiding an uncertain young man through scoring with a girl.

There's a brilliant kernel here, but the tale falls apart a little: partly because the dark-twist ending is too clearly telegraphed; but mostly because it presents this supposedly ubiquitous piece of kit, then has most of the characters acting as though they don't know it exists.

Black Mirror is often compared with The Twilight Zone, but where Rod Serling's writers roamed free from sci-fi to the supernatural, Brooker limits himself to our death dance with technology.

It's a huge subject, but the gadgetry sometimes gets in the way.

The second piece here, riffing on smart artificial intelligence, is so focussed on speculative tech, it forgets to include a story.

Still, the programme itches with intelligence and surprising passion, both for its themes, and for how TV is made.

If there's a Christmas special with more ideas this year, I'll be surprised.

Wednesday, December 17

The Fight For Saturday Night

9pm, BBC Four

I'm still hoping for the day when Michael Grade persuades/blackmails the BBC into bankrolling a sumptuous 12-part series called Action TV!: How Uncle Lew Kicked British TV's Butt Goodstyle For Three Decades Without Even Putting His Cigar Down; Narrated By Sir Roger Moore. But in the meantime, all these other programmes he's making about our TV history will do. In this one, he and well-chosen guests from the production companies involved look back in delight on the wonderfully shameful history of backbiting, skulduggery and dirty dealing that went into the deadly Saturday night ratings war between the BBC and ITV across the 1980s and 1990s - the epic struggle that gave us such fabled, bloody battles as Blind Date versus Noel's House Party. The behind the scenes stories give a picture of how freewheeling things sometimes used to be, with some monster hits arriving almost by accident, stories told with glee, insight, and gossip.

Thursday, December 18

The Knick

9pm, Sky Atlantic

It's the final episode of The Fall tonight (BBC Two, 9pm), but the BBC weren't for giving out preview copies. Meanwhile, though, it's also the last episode of The Knick, the brilliant drama directed by Steven Soderbergh, which has been one of 2014's most compulsive joys. Although it stitches together lots of familiar elements, this period piece, set in a New York hospital circa 1900, dices them up in a way that has made it one of the most original, modern and deeply felt series of recent years. Soderbergh's wonderfully immersive and expressive cinematography doesn't hurt, either. It's hardly an upbeat climax, as the various public and private crises that have been unfolding come to their inevitable ends. At the centre, deep in cocaine-fuelled obsession and paranoia, Clive Owen's magnetic Dr Thackery looks more like Dr Jekyll on the turn. Amid all the sadness, though, there's a jolt of pure, grisly Deadwood, involving a Chinese killer with an axe. A second series is coming.

Friday, December 19

The Joy Of The Bee Gees

9pm, BBC Four

A sometimes debatable title, but you get the general idea as BBC Four ignore all the bands they haven't made documentaries about and who are absolutely crying out for one, to instead roll out yet another evening devoted to one of those groups the BBC seem to have on in some shape or form every other month. This is a new profile, though, picking over their long career and the mighty medallion years of You Should Be Dancing, etc, with the surviving Gibb, Barry, and contributions from fans like Scissors Sister Ana Matronic, Robbie Williams's songwriting machine, aka Guy Chambers, and good old blessed Sir John Lydon himself. Insanely, they're not putting Saturday Night Fever on after it, but there is a compilation, Bee Gees At The BBC And Beyond at 10pm. Repeats for the Graham Norton-fronted documentary Queens Of Disco (11pm) and the compilation Disco At The BBC (12 midnight) will help you keep staying alive into the small hours.

Saturday, December 20

Rik Mayall: Lord Of Misrule

10.05pm, BBC Two

To this day, I still count Rik Mayall as the funniest thing I ever saw live on a stage. It was 1984. He ran on singing "Pants, pant-ti-tee-pants, pant-ti-tee-pants, pants-pants-pants-pants-pants-pants" to the tune of Land Of 1000 Dances... Farewell, then, People's Poet, so long Kevin Turvey, goodbye Richard "Richie" Richard, adieu Lord Flashheart; and Alan B'Stard, bon voyage. Still visibly bereft by his sudden death in June aged only 56, a host of Mayall's comrades pay tribute in this heartfelt but pretty funny profile. His soul brother in danger, Ade Edmondson, is understandably absent, but comrades from Young Ones Ben Elton, Christopher Ryan and Alexie Sayle, through Blackadder people to Greg Davies, who had Mayall play his dad in his sitcom, Man Down, are here. Other admirers, from Michael Palin to Simon Pegg, line up to declare their fandom, too, and Mayall himself is present in copious archive footage to pop the bubble when it looks like getting too serious. It comes bookended by episodes of Blackadder (9.35pm) and The Young Ones (11.05pm). Eat knuckle, Fritz.