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

Poet On The Frontline

10pm, BBC Four

Completed in 2004, when her subject was still alive, director Gabrielle Pfeiffer's documentary profiles the swashbuckling Polish writer, poet and journalist Rysard Kapuscinski, whose reporting from trouble spots around the world - chiefly Africa - is among some of the best ever written: "The conjurer extraordinary of modern reportage" as John Le Carr� hailed him. Even as he was struggling to stay alive on foreign battlefields, however, Kapuscinski also had to fight censorship at home to get published in Poland. He died in 2007 at the age of 74, leaving Pfeiffer's film all the more valuable a document. She travels with him back to Pinsk, the town where he was born in 1932 then had to flee as a child, forbidden to return for four decades. From here, Kapuscinski interweaves the story of his experiences as a refugee during the Second World War with the things he later witnessed in the wars of the Third World.

Monday, January 19

Catastrophe

10pm, Channel 4

If last week's hilarious episode was anything to judge by there won't be anything on TV tonight that's even half as funny as Broadchurch, Home Of Big Sad Faces And Preposterous Goings On. All the same, it's worth making a date with this new sitcom, starring and co-written by Sharon Horgan and the American comedian Rob Delaney. She's Sharon, an Irishwoman in London; he's Rob, a visiting American; strangers who meet in a bar, spend a couple of days in bed and then go their separate ways - until, three months later, she phones him in the States to tell him she's pregnant. He flies back, and they sort of find themselves sort of planning to sort of stay together and sort of see how it goes ... The opening scenes, depicting their hectic three-night-stand, are a little over familiar, but it settles into something better. Following her cult hits Pulling and Free Agents, the series forms a trilogy of smart, grown-up, harassed, likeable and slightly filthy-minded romcoms by Horgan. She and Delaney are likeable as a couple who are baffled to find themselves a couple.

Tuesday, January 20

The Eichmann Show

9pm, BBC Two

Following Fargo, Martin Freeman gets a chance to stretch his American accent further with this feature-length docudrama, focussing on the efforts of pioneering US TV producer Milton Fruchtman to televise the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann - the Nazi who had been one of the architects of the Holocaust, and who had recently, finally, been run to ground in Argentina by agents of Israel's secret service, Mossad. Set in Israel, the drama presents Fruchtman (Freeman) as a man on a mission, determined to get the horrific truth of the death camps out in the light in front of a global audience, despite many obstacles, including indifference and sinister opposition. Anthony LaPaglia co-stars as Leo Hurwitz, the groundbreaking documentary director Fruchtman hired to film the trial, who had been blacklisted in the US during the McCarthy anti-Communist witchhunts. The leads are both excellent, but it's the archive footage of the real trial, captured by the real Fruchtman and Hurwitz, that will stay with you.

Wednesday, January 21

Wolf Hall

9pm, BBC Two

If Wolf Hall simply had to concern itself with being the best period drama about The Tudors on BBC Two since, well, The Tudors - the unfailingly ridiculous American import that ran, or at least dribbled enthusiastically, between 2007 and 2010 - then writer Peter Straughan and director Peter Kosminsky wouldn't have much to worry about.

But Straughan and Kosminsky also have to contend with having taken on one of the most eagerly anticipated literary adaptations of recent years: a best-seller that not only shifted the parameters of the historical novel, but which, in its intense reimagining and repositioning of Thomas Cromwell, might even come to influence the way future historians consider the period.

As it is, it will be readers of Hilary Mantel's

Booker-winning sensation who will get the very most

out of the television adaptation, at least to begin

with.

Fans will find nits to pick, but they will also have huge advantages over viewers coming fresh to the territory, not least in little matters like where we are, when we are, what's happening, who is who, and why who they are, what they're doing to each other, and when. All these things are important.

This Wolf Hall is admirably slow, stark, sombre and spare, yet there is still some rush and confusion to the first episode: it flashes back and forwards; sometimes, it flashes further back within a flashback; and sometimes it turns out not to have flashed at all, just when you thought it did.

However, by the second episode, the programme is finding and keeping its own dark rhythm, and newcomers and Mantel lovers alike will be putting aside their worries and their annotated copies, and just letting themselves get pulled deep into it - and both for the same main reason.

There is a huge amount to admire. The script is serious, tense and pierced by stabbing wit. Kosminsky assembles the perilous 1520s with great care. Paradoxically, he creates convincing bareness through accumulation of detail, lavishing enormous attention on light: the days are limpid, liquid; the thick nights astonishing velvet black, peopled with half-faces carved out of candlelight.

And what faces: Jonathan Pryce as the doomed Cardinal Wolsey; Damian Lewis, coming slowly into view as the mercurial Henry VIII; Mark Gatiss who, as bobbing court schemer Stephen Gardiner, not only suggests a living Hans Holbein, but also takes a step closer to claiming his destiny as the Donald Pleasence of our era.

There are other greats in the shadows - Joanne Whalley, Mathieu Amalric, Bernard Hill - but the reason Wolf Hall succeeds as well as it does, the reason people will want to keep watching, is its Cromwell, Mark Rylance.

He is not exactly a stranger to the screen, but Rylance is far more a creature of the theatre, and his TV work is relatively rare. Watching him hold centre stage among such familiar performers is a small revelation: his Cromwell has the fitting air of being an unknown quality.

It's a guarded, watchful performance, almost mask-like, but one that lets you catch sight of the human eyes looking out from behind the mask - acting of a pace and pared-down precision that feels as if it has a lot

of thought behind it, yet glances off you as entirely natural.

You might know the history, and you might know

what happens in Mantel's books but, like Mantel, Rylance brings Thomas Cromwell to life anew,

stepping out of history as a breathing, thinking, feeling man.

He keeps you guessing, wondering and wanting to know more.

Thursday, January 22

Cucumber

9pm, Channel 4

If you've been watching Channel 4 you will have seen teasers for Cucumber-Banana-Tofu, and if you're wondering what those titles are about the opening sequence of Cucumber lays it out. We meet our protagonist, Henry (Vincent Franklin), pushing his trolley around a shop, ogling the men around him as they finger the produce, while he muses on a Swiss scientific study that classified the four degrees of male arousal: tofu, banana (peeled), banana (unpeeled) and cucumber. The series marks the return to Channel 4 of Russell T Davies who, before resurrecting Doctor Who was known as the writer who made Queer As Folk. This is a return to Tales Of Sex In The City territory, though the UK's gay experience has changed a lot and Davies, cannily, chooses to present it through the jaded eyes of a frustrated middle-aged protagonist. Great to see Julie Hesmondhaigh (Corrie's missed Hayley) as Henry's sister. It's complemented on E4 by Banana (10pm), shorts following the younger characters, and head to the Channel 4 site for Tofu, a documentary series.

Friday, January 23

Sound Of Song

9pm, BBC Four

In part two of his marvellous series, Neil Brand is all about magnetic tape and slapback. The introduction of tape to the recording process kickstarted a long revolution in pop music, from the echo chamber of Sun studios in Memphis, where Elvis was first captured, all the way to Abbey Road, where The Beatles and producer George Martin were able to turn the studio itself into a compositional tool. Visiting the studios to try them out and tinkle the ivories, Brand also considers other high water marks of 1960s production - Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound and Brian Wilson's teenage symphonies - interviewing Wilson and legendary Spector girls Darlene Love and La La Brooks. It's followed by two really horrendous programmes,

Elvis: That's Alright 60 Years On (10pm), in which

actor Sam Palladio "pays tribute", and The Beatles' Please Please Me: Remaking A Classic (11pm), in

which various horrors re-record a version of the mop-tops' debut album for reasons that have been lost to history.

Saturday, January 24

Spiral

9pm, BBC Four

Back to the best thing on TV at the moment. We're hitting the halfway mark already, and even though the case seems to be stalled, things are moving fast. Languishing in jail as prime suspect for the murders of his wife and child, Jaulin is slipping deeper into hopelessness, and the troubled Pierre is looking for

any glimmer of hope he can throw his client as a lifeline. Out on the streets, Laure and her team stumble over evidence that seems to cast the dead woman in a

new light, but persuading the increasingly short-tempered Judge Roban that it's enough to open a new line of inquiry might be another matter. Meanwhile: the cops are tasked with pulling off a spectacular bust; Tintin grows ever more suspicious of their new informant; Pierre prepares for the Bar Council elections; and the frustrated Josephine takes on the case of a young new client� Lock the doors, turn off the phones, shut down the Twitter, and just watch it tonight, Spiral people, because this week's double bill is an important one.