Poldark

9pm, BBC One

Throw open your window tonight around twenty past nine, lean out into the cooling night, listen hard, and you might catch the gentle sound of several million voices raised up in unison all across these lands: “Phwoooooaarrr-heh-hey…”

Twenty minutes and twenty-six seconds. That is, roughly, how long it takes for Ross Poldark to get down into the hot parts of his struggling copper mine in a bad mood tonight, whip off his blouse, heft his massive chisel, and start hammering at solid rock, torso all a-glisten in the greasy half-naked candlelight. There is much to be said in admiration of Debbie Horsfield, the writer behind the world beating new incarnation of Poldark, but it can be boiled down to three key points: she knows what her audience wants; she knows how to give it to them; and she knows when and where to deliver it.

It has been over a year since the first series ended, and Horsfield mercilessly left us hanging hopelessly from a cliff in Cornwall. As the handy “Previously in Poldarkland…” sequence that opens things tonight reminds us, we left off on a real nail-biter:

Having survived the beastly snobbery of their neighbours, the shuddering and sneering of society at large, the constant plotting of dastardly bankers The Warleggans, the near ruination of their finances, the plundering night riots on the storm-tossed beach, and the loss of their darling infant daughter to the ravages of the dreaded Putrid Throat, Ross (Aidan Turner) and his lowly wildling true love Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) stood high on their clifftop, quietly indulging their shared hobby of staring out to sea while competing to see which could look the most tousled. Then Redcoats appeared, to haul Ross away at musket point on a charge of “Wreckin’, insoitin’ a riot…an’ murder!”

As we return, Ross is still a free man, just, but his days may well be numbered. He has been ordered to turn himself in for trial at the upcoming Bodmin Assizes, a date that could end with his hanging. As the day draws near, his estranged cousin, Drippy Elizabeth, still carrying a torch, attempts to offer help, but Ross, being Ross damn it, scorns any aid. Meanwhile, in secret, Evil George Warleggan stirs the pot against him by soliciting false testimony from witnesses, and spreading rumours in scurrilous pamphlets.

All this, of course, is just the very business. A classic example of Horsfield’s deft ability to cut to the chase, this opener not only picks up exactly where we left off, and not only lays out the territory for the entire season to come, it also reminds us why we fell in love with the show in the first place, playing like a Jive Poldark greatest-hits medley 12” mix: all sweeping shots of the summer sunsets and gently milky mornings of the past; ladies gazing up from beneath their eyelashes; wiggy villains with bastard faces; us-against-the-world love; mega brooding from a damn-your-eyes hero; and, just when you’d given up on him doing it, a quick burst of galloping along a clifftop on a very big horse.

The mixture is one part ridiculous, two parts romantic, two parts ridiculously romantic. To this cocktail, right at the death, Horsfield tosses in another shameless cliffhanger that could cause widespread faints and vapours. Poldark is what Sunday nights were made for. There is no better man to see us through the next ten weeks, as the days grow dark and winter approaches. Hoorah sir. And again, hoorah.

Cold Feet

9pm, STV

Thirteen years since we last saw them, almost all of the original cast return as writer Mike Bullen brings his hit comedy-drama back for a keenly, if nervously anticipated sixth series. (Any viewers new to the show who are trying to catch up before the new series begins by watching box sets of the old programmes should look away now...Helen Baxendale’s Rachel won’t be back, because the character got killed-off in the last series in 2003.) But can the chemistry between Adam (James Nesbitt), Karen (Hermione Norris), David (Robert Bathurst), Jen (Fay Ripley) and Pete (John Thomson) that charmed viewers when they were in their 30s still work as the characters move deeper into their 50s? Actually, it looks like it can, as this opener is pretty much business as usual, albeit with more baggage, and more debts. Adam has some big news. But not everyone is as happy about it as he might have hoped.

Motherland

10pm, BBC Two

Deep inside the BBC, there is perhaps someone who imagines they understand what they’re doing with this on-off Sitcoms Season. From this side of the screen, though, it has come across mostly as a bewildering blizzard of one-off pilots that leave you vaguely wondering if you’re maybe supposed to go somewhere later and vote for the one you’d like to see turned into a series, only they’ve forgotten to tell you. So far, my ballot is going to this one, about the trials of middle-class mums and their primary school kids, which manages to be not quite as annoying as that description sounds. Partly, it’s because it was written by the comedy equivalent of a pile-up, with Sharon Horgan, stand-up Holly Walsh and Graham Linehan and his wife Helen all tapping the keyboard. Partly it’s down to the excellent cast, led by Anna Maxwell Martin as the super-harassed Julia, and Diane Morgan as the infinitely more resigned Liz - a surprisingly good double act, once they get the wine open. Smart but stupid, a winning mix.

Our Girl

9pm, BBC One

The Army drama Our Girl used to star someone who used to be in EastEnders, Lacey Turner, but she’s gone back to EastEnders now, so for this second full series they’ve got in someone who used to be in Coronation Street instead, and got her to play more or less the same character, except with a different name, in the hope that no one will really notice. Michelle Keegan, formerly Corrie’s Tina, is our new recruit, Georgie Lane, a mouthy and experienced medic who has joined up with regular haughty dish Captain James (Ben Aldridge) and his 2 Section for a humanitarian mission in Kenya. Like her predecessor, she faces the prospect of staking a place in a very male and very macho environment, but the whole unit is thrown in at the deep end when an IED explodes just after they arrive at a refugee camp on the border with Somalia. Things only grow more dangerous for Georgie when she gets involved in the case of a kidnapped aid worker.

Thursday

Paralympics 2016

From 1pm, Channel 4

And so back down to Rio, as, following last night’s Opening Ceremony (Wednesday, 9pm), Channel 4 begins its live coverage of the games themselves. The talk so far has been of cutbacks, poor ticket sales, empty stadiums, and athletes being left in danger of being unable to attend, if they’ve not been banned outright. But it’s time to see whether all that will fade away as Day One begins. Between 1pm and 6pm today, there’s coverage of the athletics, cycling, swimming, the women’s and men’s wheelchair basketball, table tennis, shooting and the men’s seven-aside football. Coverage resumes after the news with the comedy roundup show The Last Leg (7.30pm), followed by cycling, swimming and athletics through until 1am. As is The Law, Clare Balding, the woman who first invented the Olympics back in the olden times and won gold in every event at the first ever games, leads the presenting team.

Joanna Lumley’s Japan

9pm, STV

See, this is all lovely, of course. But, still, there’s a pretty big opportunity that has been missed here. Surely, if you’re going to get Joanna Lumley to go all the way to Japan to do some filming, what you really want to do is make AVENGER: my long-slumbering 10-part script, which sees Lumley at long last reviving the role of Purdey, the high-kicking super spy she played opposite Patrick Macnee’s Steed in The New Avengers. It’s a high-action, but moving and morally murky tale that sees old ghosts from Purdey’s past come back to haunt the retired agent as she’s drawn into international conflict with rival clans of sword-wielding Yakuza living by the old bushido code, and features a hair-rasing fight aboard a bullet train, lots of scenes of her driving around in a fantastic 1970s sports car very fast, and an unlikely romance with an imperilled Scottish TV critic. But they’ve not made that, they’ve made this, another charming travelogue, as Lumley jaunts through Japan, gazing at macaque monkeys and the like.

Exhibition

10.35pm, BBC Two

Writer-director Joanna Hogg’s glacial, claustrophobic 2013 movie is not for everyone, but confirms her as one of the most distinctive voices in British cinema today. Punk scholars and contemporary art musers will want to check it out, anyway, as former Slit Viv Albertine co-stars alongside Turner-nominated artist Liam Gillick. They play “D” and “H,” an artist couple who have lived and worked for years in their striking modernist house in London. Gorgeous, austere, their home becomes the third character: it is the closest they have to a shared, connecting passion; at the same time, a hard laboratory, in which stews a chemistry of unspoken desires, resentments, fears and thwarted dreams. Hogg withholds information. What story there is leaks through in their conflicted decision to sell the place – it seems something bad might have happened here. Cool, immaculately composed and demanding you pay attention, it’s in the enigmatic European arthouse spirit. The surface is calm, sleek, but something is scratching away underneath. Tom Hiddleston cameos as the estate agent.