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

Hermitage Revealed

9pm, BBC Four

That's Russia's great State Hermitage Museum, in St Petersburg, one of the largest and grandest museums in the world. This good-looking documentary by director Margy Kinmonth is a virtual guidebook to the place, taking us through its history, from its inception as an imperial palace under Catherine The Great, through the revolution to its reinvention as state museum. Meanwhile, the camera glides around its rooms and gets up close to the exhibits, ranging from Rembrandt and Rubens, through to Van Gogh, Picasso, and Kandinsky. The museum's director, Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky, who cheerfully describes his management style as "very totalitarian," is among the contributors, along with sculptor Antony Gormley and architect Rem Koolhass. But the real stars appear when the camera ventures down into the basement, to discover the colony of cats that has lived on the heating pipes down there since the time of Catherine.

Monday, January 5

Broadchurch

9pm, STV

To cut to the chase, since the first series was such a smash and it's all so very special now, ITV aren't giving out previews of the new Broadchurch. Even details of the storyline are under embargo, so I can't even say what it's about, let alone whether it's any good. What we do know is that it will reunite Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman), the wounded cops who investigated the murder of the schoolboy in the small town by the sea last time. You might recall that Hardy was haunted by his failures on a similar earlier case, which could be a clue as to where this one might be going. And, at some point, it will involve guest star Charlotte Rampling, the very typing of whose name gives my fingertips a thrill. Broadchurch's first series was one of British TV's most successful attempts at doing a Scandi. Still, as satisfying as it was, it's hard to pinpoint just why it became such a massive hit, although the chemistry between Tennant and Colman had a lot to do with it. However it goes, it will surely be better than Tennant's US remake, Gracepoint, anyway.

Tuesday, January 6

Count Arthur Strong

10.35pm, BBC One

Excellently, despite only about 14 people watching the first one, they've made a second series of Steve Delaney and Graham Linehan's quietly tremendous sitcom. If you're not up to speed, Count Arthur Strong (Delaney) is a former variety show performer, turned staggering old duffer; Rory Kinnear co-stars as Michael Baker, a shy, slightly bitter, struggling writer, whose late father once had a double act with Arthur. Filmed before a studio audience, the show is bright, light and old-fashioned in a smart way, managing to strike a balance between being quite sweet while being very stupid, as you might expect from the man who gave us The IT Crowd and Father Ted. As we begin, Michael is in the throes of writer's block, and so, to put off trying to do any work, he returns to London and Arthur's gang. But he's less than delighted to discover that, in his absence, Arthur has dashed off a novel of his own. And even less delighted when he discovers what's in it…

Wednesday, January 7

True Detective

9pm, Sky Atlantic

A repeat for the warped American crime show that was one of the highlights of 2014, and one of the biggest TV events of the past few years. Its success is due partly to the wired southern-gothic writing of creator Nic Pizzolatto and partly to the sultry, swampy, snaky, almost occult mood cooked up by director Cary Joli Fukunaga. Mostly, though, what draws you like a magnet is the double act between Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as Marty Hart and Rust Cohle, cops investigating a murder with deep and twisted roots out among the bayous of Louisiana. Cohle is a doomy existentialist with screeds of purple dialogue: the character could have been preposterous, but McConaughey does an amazing job at creating a genuine enigma, beautifully balanced by Harrelson's plain-speaking, bull-headed screw-up. It's very difficult to believe that the second series due later this year, starring Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn, can possibly match it. Beginning with tonight's double bill, Sky Atlantic are repeating the full thing this week.

Thursday, January 8

Bring Back Borstal

9pm, STV

I couldn't decide which was the classiest thing on offer over on Channel 4 tonight: Shut Ins: Britain's Fattest People (9pm) or Sex Party Secrets (10pm). So, instead, here's a programme about young offenders. This four-part documentary is like a penal version of The Edwardian House. Criminologist David Wilson is overseeing a throwback period experiment, recreating a 1930s-style Borstal where 14 young troublemakers, half with criminal convictions, have volunteered to spend a month, to see what, if any effect the old system - a relentless cycle of work, education, discipline and intense physical activity - might have on them, and their chances of re-offending. Installing himself as The Governor, Wilson's institution, set up at a castle in Northumberland, looks convincingly bleak, although it's hard not to feel that the fundamentally made-up nature of the entire project inevitably undermines it a little.

Friday, January 9

Meat Loaf: In And Out Of Hell

9pm, BBC Four

Ever wondered how Meat Loaf got his name? All is revealed as the Bat Out Of Hell screamer gets the BBC Four music profile treatment, which features contributions from some of his old pals from high school in Dallas, where he earned his moniker while enduring a very bleak childhood. The big man himself is on hand to recount his tumultuous rise, fall, and rise again, beginning with his decision to leave Texas following his mother's death, to try and make it in LA. By 1969 he was broke and disillusioned, scraping a living as a parking attendant when he was invited to audition for the musical Hair. It turned out to be the big break, leading to the meeting with Jim Steinman and the album that that would change both their lives. But, as they recount, getting people to listen to Bat Out Of Hell wasn't easy - and Meat Loaf would have many more hard times ahead after he became famous.

Saturday, January 10

Spiral

9pm, BBC Four

2015 is already better than 2014 in one significant respect: 2015 has new Spiral.

We're into series five, but it's alarming to realise that it has been almost nine years now since this great and twisted French series, following variously screwed-up cops and lawyers through the murkier backstreets of Paris, first washed up on our shores without fanfare.

Spiral, it bears repeating, was the first Eurocrime import BBC Four tried out - before the whole Nordic noir frenzy - and it's still the best. The show is grubbier, smaller, harder, pulpier, stranger and faster than its Scandinavian cousins, and grander, too.

The first series, back in 2006, was simply demented: as it went on, it took on an increasingly gothic, almost surreal aspect, getting darker and more grotesquely melodramatic until, by the end, you wouldn't have been surprised to discover the villain was The Phantom Of The Opera. Spiral has grown grittier since, with our anti-heroes facing drug gangs, arms dealers, and anarchist terrorists, but shadowy shivers of weirdness remain. In large part, it's because, while the cop stuff is familiar, the French legal system that surrounds them is so foreign, with judges leading investigations, while battling each other in their palaces of justice. There's always the sense of things unseen, age-old power struggles, poisonous politics, obscure motives.

Plotting in their dark, whispering, wood-lined corridors, the members of the legal system are like some secret society. The show's French title, Engrenages, translates better as "gears" or "cogs," which is a better fit for the cops and small-fish lawyers we follow: tiny parts in a machine they'll never fully understand. Caught in the middle, getting all mashed up, is our lead detective, Captain Laure Berthaud (the unutterably fabulous Caroline Proust). Laure has some similarities with The Killing's Sarah Lund, but she's wearier and messed up in smaller, more authentic ways, and the consequences of her often ill-judged actions carry through in more believable fashion. By now, they're piling up.

The last series saw her wrecking her private life, and suffering tragic loss. As the new one begins, she is numbly hitting self-destruct: we find her alone in a bar, ragged and grimy, lining up the latest anonymous one-night stand.

Spiral has taken us close to Laure, but we've never been more intimate than in the opening scenes of the new series, and never seen her so vulnerable.

These characters have amassed a lot of back-story, guilt, animosity, dependency and love by now, a dense, tangled web of emotions. Most touching is the relationship between Laure and her devoted cop sidekick, Gilou (Thierry Godard), who has gone from being a brutal, corrupt and coke-addled self-loathing nightmare to something like a decent human: Obelix to her Asterix. A similar, but slippier transformation has occurred around the mesmerising lawyer Josephine Karlsson (Audrey Fleurot), red of hair, black of heart, whose ambitions saw her dancing ever deeper into the dark side, but may now be on the straight and narrow. Or not. Meanwhile, operating above them all, is the wilfully solitary, brilliantly devious old judge, Robard (Philippe Duclos), always on the side of the angels, yet prepared to be as cruel as any villain to see the right thing done. It begins as Spiral always begins, with the grizzly discovery of a corpse. A woman's body is pulled from the Seine. When they get her onto dry land, the crime is revealed to be even worse, and hits Laure harder than ever. Dark stuff: perfect for the January blues.