Damien Love's TV picks

9pm, BBC Four

Your home of good ideas, BBC Four is hosting an evening devoted to theatre tonight, opening with Mark Lawson Talks To David Hare (8pm), an intimate but wide-ranging interview with the man regarded as one of our most important living playwrights. The main event, however, is this two-hour broadcast of live theatre, coming from the iconic, sadly defunct old Television Centre that is currently in the process of being turned into luxury flats, the fools. Four pieces will be performed: the Gecko company presents The Time Of Your Life, about one man’s struggle against the tide of social media; Richard DeDomenici unveils a new instalment of his Redux Project, in which he will recreate clips supposedly culled from the BBC archives; Bradford’s Common Wealth group perform No Guts, No Heart, No Glory, about a boxing gym for Muslim women; and, for the glittering finale, Jess Thom’s Touretteshero brings us a lively Broadcast From Biscuit Land, starring Thom, who has Tourette syndrome. Stay tuned for a repeat of Blood And Glitter, the documentary celebrating 70s years of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre, bringing down the curtain at 11pm.

Monday

London Spy

9pm, BBC Two

Tom Rob Smith’s opaque story of love and espionage got off to an instantly intriguing start last week, but it really begins to sink its claws in tonight. With sordid details about the death of Alex – and his part in it – making the press, Danny (Ben Whishaw) grows determined to blow the whistle on his theory that his lover was murdered, and the whole extreme S&M death scene staged. When he goes to the papers, however, he receives a message from an unexpected source: Alex’s parents, who Alex had told him were dead. As Danny travels toward a meeting in the lonely countryside, he begins a journey down a rabbit hole into a sinister wonderland where it seems that nothing is quite what it seems. It’s an excellent episode that simultaneously tightens the screw on the what-the-hell-is-happening mystery plot, while growing stranger and hazier as it goes. Best of all, Charlotte Rampling turns up, in the full Rampling ice-weird mode, as the mysterious Frances.

Tuesday

Imagine… The Last Impresario

10.25pm, BBC One

“The most famous person you’ve never heard of” is how Greta Scacchi sums up the flamboyant theatre and film producer Michael White, and she has a point. Born in Glasgow in 1936, White was at the cutting edge of London theatre in the 1960s and early-70s – he put on the notorious erotic revue Oh! Calcutta! and the deathless Rocky Horror Show – more or less invented art happenings while introducing such figures as Yoko Ono to audiences, and brought films including Monty Python And The Holy Grail and John Waters’s Polyester to the screen. Along the way, he rubbed shoulders and swapped excesses with pretty much everyone, as his private scrapbook of photos attests. The director of this profile, Gracie Otto, first encountered him at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, by which Point White was suffering ill health and financial setbacks, but still the party hound, refusing to let it get him down. Her film leaves some questions unanswered about the low points of his career, but White cuts such a fascinating figure, and his story is so vibrant, it’s easy to ignore the flaws. The interviewees include Kate Moss, John Cleese, Barry Humphries, John Waters, Naomi Watts and Anna Wintour, among others.

Wednesday

Toast Of London

10.30pm, Channel 4

It was a black day for world culture and the progress of civilisation in general a few months ago, when the BBC announced that they wouldn’t be giving Vic and Bob’s House Of Fools another season. This kind of thinking is exactly what’s wrong with this planet. Lovers of the unashamedly stupid can take a crumb of comfort, however, as proud HOFer Matt Berry returns as the jaded London thespian Stephen Toast for a third series of his other beloved and deeply silly sitcom, co-written with Father Ted guy Arthur Matthews. It’s business as usual: Toast is still doing voiceover work for Clem Fandango, but there’s a new face on the scene, muscling in on his patch with a suspiciously familiar voice. Meanwhile, after getting slightly drunk on Lorraine, Toast tells a story he really should have kept to himself, about the time he witnessed Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landings for the US government…

Thursday

The Last Panthers

9pm, Sky Arts

Sky’s doomy Trans-Europe thriller has a knack for opening sequences. Last week, there was the heart-pounding diamond heist; tonight, there’s a nerve-shredding sequence as riot-suited Marseilles police mount a raid on an enormous housing block in the projects, hoping to locate the weapons the robbers used. Leading the operation is the cop Khalil, who grew up in the neighbourhood, and whose personal connection leads him to make some rash decisions. Indeed, the main theme of the drama is how the past hangs heavy on all the protagonists. Still bruised from her recent trip to Serbia – but more deeply haunted by her earlier experiences in the country – the insurance adjuster Naomi heads to a jail in Belgium, to question an imprisoned former leader of the Panthers gang on where the diamonds might be now. Meanwhile, in Belgrade, Milan, the leader of the thieves, has fallen in with faces from the old Panthers days as they begin work on a new scheme, to get in on the action surrounding the building of a vast new airport – a project that’s also attracting the attention of Naomi’s bosses.

Friday

The Man In The High Castle
Amazon Instant Prime Video
What if Germany had won the race to invent the H-bomb during the Second World War, and dropped it on America? That’s the question Philip K Dick posed with his alternative history novel The Man In The High Castle, set in 1962 in a long-beaten USA uneasily divided between its conquerors: everything west of the Rocky Mountains forms The Japanese Pacific States; to the east is The Greater Nazi Reich; between the two lies a neutral zone. Meanwhile, in the cracks, stubborn rumours of resistance are beginning to grow. Following a well-received pilot last year, this 10-part series, written by X-Files veteran Frank Spotnitz and executive produced by Ridley Scott, is available from today. As with most Philip K Dick adaptations (see Scott’s Blade Runner), it’s not really like the author, yet becomes intriguing in itself. Early episodes are a little clunky, but the resistance story forms a strong spine, while the visions of life in fascist retro America are striking.

Saturday

The Bridge
9pm, BBC Four
On a cold, coppery night in Malmo, in a dank corner of a lonely industrial zone, a killer sits doing unspeakable things with a corpse, some make-up and some mannequins, and all is right with the world. Or, at least, all is right with Saturday nights for the next five weeks, as The Bridge returns for another series of deeply satisfying double bills of Scandinavian slaughter in sodium-soaked cityscapes.
Long standing fans, however, will already be wondering how satisfying this third instalment of the Swedish-Danish detective drama can possibly be, given the departure from the show of Kim Bodnia who, as Martin Rohde, the bear-like Danish cop partnered with his pale, peculiar Swedish counterpart Saga Norén (Sofia Helin), formed half of the greatest odd couple in recent TV.
From The Big Sleep to Dirty Harry, the best crime stories are rarely primarily about the crimes, and The Bridge is a perfect illustration. If pushed, at gunpoint, I could probably recall vague details about the plots 
of the previous series, just about. What I really remember, though, is the way that, when confronted with something odd or outrageous – which happens a lot when you spend time investigating murder with Saga and her tough, fragile, Asperger’s-like condition – Martin would just start laughing. And how, when it got really bad, she allowed him to give her a hug. 
Bodnia had initially intended to return for Bridge III, but objected to the direction the writers intended to 
take his character. But if the relationship between 
Saga and Martin was the main reason we watched 
– aside from Saga’s olive 1970s Porsche, the 
greatest character car since Jim Rockford hung 
up his Pontiac Firebird – can the programme 
function without him? Can she? 
On the evidence of the opening episodes, yes. This new Bridge misses Bodnia badly, but it makes a point of missing him, and while his absence lingers, it’s worth considering how a third series might have been with him in it. Series Two ended with Martin going to prison, and so we would have been faced with a story that either bent itself into convolutions to get him out, or involved Saga popping in to jail every episode.
As it is, the writers have been forced to stay true to the consequences of their story, and to their characters. We learn that Saga, who was responsible for Martin’s arrest, hasn’t even been to visit him, a point that would strike an off note in many dramas, yet rings oddly true for her, despite (or precisely because of) him being the nearest thing she’s had to a friend.
Of course, when that killer murders a Danish citizen on Saga’s Swedish turf, it means the Copenhagen force must send another cop to work with her. This is the most dangerous ground for the series, but they make it work, partly by casting the grand Kirsten Olesen as the new partner. (Danish addicts will recognise Olesen as the dying artist who causes all the trouble in The Legacy.)
Elsewhere, as the story unfolds in hypnotic rhythms, come familiar figures, like Saga’s concerned boss, Hans, who has a larger part this time out, and intriguing strangers, including a pill-popping young man in a curious relationship, whose exact role takes a while to reveal itself. Meanwhile, other faces from Saga’s troubled past appear, as we begin to learn more about her. It might not be quite the same Bridge that you first fell in love with, but you’ll get over it.