Friday

A Series Of Unfortunate Events

Netflix

Time is weird. When it was announced that Netflix’s first big event of 2017 was to be an adaptation of A Series Of Unfortunate Events, the wry and dour children’s books by the shadowy Lemony Snicket (aka author Daniel Handler), I spent a long while scratching my head thinking, Eh? That can’t be right. They only just did that big film version with Jim Carrey.

After intensive research, however, it seems the terrifying truth is that 13 years have somehow passed since that movie came out, long enough to pretend it never happened and try again. Still, watching the new show is a weird experience. It’s different from the film in some ways, but very like it in more, and the déjà vu effect is like being battered by recovered memories of an event They have tried to surgically wipe from your mind.

Running to 13 titles, Handler’s best-selling books unfold the sad and sorry saga of the resilient and inventive Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus and the biting baby Sunny. Left orphaned when their parents are all burned up in a mysterious fire, the children are delivered into the maleficent custody of a distant relative, Count Olaf, a foul and murderous soul, who devotes his life to trying to do away with them, so he can claim their inheritance.

Pitched between Roald Dahl at his most macabre and the brilliant cartoons by Edward Gorey depicting tiny tots meeting awful demises, they are books in which style is as important as narrative, both in the deadpan way Handler doles out morose disaster and plays with story-telling as the enigmatic narrator, Lemony Snicket, and in the way they are presented: all are illustrated by Brett Helquist, whose bold drawings weave a world equal parts gothic Victoriana and 1950s New York.

The attempt to replicate this storyland style accounts for the strong similarities between the 2004 movie and the 2017 series. If Neil Patrick Harris, who plays Olaf in the new show, looks exactly like Carrey’s Olaf, that’s because both are obliged to look like the Olaf Helquist drew. Fair enough –millions of loyal readers would rebel if Olaf didn’t look like Olaf. But resemblances go further, and not simply because both film and TV show opt for using subtitles to explain baby Sunny’s gurgles, or because Malina Weissman, who plays 14-year-old Violet in the new series, looks quite uncannily like Emily Browning did in the movie.

The series tones down the movie’s gothic picture-book shading slightly, and slightly amplifies the bright 1950s tones, but it’s like the difference between Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. In fact, the series is directed by another stylist, Barry Sonnenfeld, setting out to rekindle the creepy, kooky fun he had with his Addams Family movies in the 1990s. Sadly, though, while it looks that part, fun, any feeling at all, keeps slipping out of reach.

This again might be because of the attempt to catch the books’ tone. The series is scripted by Handler himself, but lays the deadpan on too thick. Trapped inside ironic picture book rules, everyone acts within the same narrow range, a hip, past-it-all zone reminiscent of Wes Anderson, but without the bruised and buried emotion that threatens to break out. The one-note effect all smothers the show: the sinister isn’t sinister, the funny isn’t funny, and the adventures have no thrill. The movie, which strayed from this path a little, had more oomph. After the TV show’s first episode, it’s difficult to recall any events that matter, unfortunate or not.

Sunday

Dance, Dance, Dance

6.30pm, STV

Or, as Craig Revel Horwood might put it: “No. Darling. No.” This is not, of course, the first time ITV has attempted a feelgood dance competition juggernaut designed to rip off Strictly. Most of my grey hairs date to the Saturday night in 2007 when they wheeled out Baby Ballroom: The Championship, an episode that has since been hushed up, but is surely waiting to come back and haunt us. For this new one, possibly conceived by a desperate drunk in the taxi on the way to the studio, couples consisting of A Celebrity and Their Partner (Or Maybe Their Pal, Or Something), try to replicate “iconic pop and movie dance sequences,” while judges armed with digital scoreboards and sincere enthusiasm make up marks. Tonight’s celebrities include Killer Katie from ages ago on Corrie, and a man from EastEnders who smiles a whole lot. The iconic dance sequences include one based on an Ed Sheeran video. The devastating lack of atmosphere would make Buzz Aldrin nostalgic. Alesha Dixon presents, with a fixed stare.

Monday

Class

10.45pm, BBC One

Whether Doctor Who needs a spin-off remains debatable – judging by that last Christmas special, they should concentrate on finding some stories for the main series itself – although I still have a huge soft spot for the zippy children’s show, The Sarah Jane Adventures. Originally shown online on BBC Three last October, this new satellite, created by author Patrick Ness, sets out to be something (notionally) more grown-up, along the lines of Torchwood, but can’t quite decide where to pitch itself. Set among the sixth form of Coal Hill School, as autumn prom approaches shadowy intergalactic strangeness is occurring, and a mismatched bunch of students are drawn in, along with physics teacher Miss Quill (the great Katherine Kelly). It’s closer to a Space Scooby Doo than a sexy dark messed up Young Adult novel, but it perks up when Peter Capaldi contributes his guest slot as The Doc. Class didn’t do the numbers the BBC had hoped for online, but maybe the terrestrial presence will draw more eyes.

Tuesday

Sighthill

9pm, BBC Two

In 2006, director Darren Hercher made Sighthill Stories, a memorable picture of a Glasgow community entering a period of enforced change, focussing on the children of Sighthill Primary as the estate around them was cleared for a massive regeneration programme, and the 1960s tower blocks above were emptied for demolition. A decade on, Hercher returns just before the final two high-rises are pulled down, to catch some of the last residents as they prepare to leave and move into the new houses that now stand where the shadows of the towers once fell. The original film caught the anxieties some residents felt about the future, and the air of uncertainty remains thick as the camera moves through the ambiguous new landscape following a troubled teenager, a pensioner, an Iraqi asylum seeker, and a young boy dreaming of not having to share a bedroom with his brothers and sisters. Hercher provides no context or explanation (a little might have helped), but, leaving more questions than answers, it’s another intimate, hard and haunting piece.

Wednesday

Hospital

9pm, BBC Two

In recent years, the TV series that dealt most acutely with the crisis facing the NHS has been a sitcom, Getting On. Meanwhile, most actual hospital documentaries have stuck to the rut Channel 4 likes, sticking cameras in to watch people have babies or not, or sitting in A&E, so we can sigh, wince, feel warm-hearted and cry in the right places. This exceptional new BBC series, filmed across October and November last year, cuts through to the heart of the issue, offering a detailed and difficult picture of a service stretched to breaking point, and the impact on the wards and waiting lists. One strand in this opening episode encapsulates an entire national predicament: a patient, already prepared for theatre, waits to be taken in for a potentially life-saving procedure – only to be told it must be postponed yet again, because an emergency case is coming in, and there’s only one post-operative intensive care unit bed available. As cameras follow medical staff and managers trying to juggle such situations, it’s grim, fascinating, maybe essential viewing.

Thursday

Unforgotten

9pm, STV

Detectives Cassie Stuart and Sunny Khan (Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar) have identified the victim whose body was dredged from the river. Now, running down leads 26 years cold, they must try to solve his murder, and begin calling on the scattered suspects who don’t yet suspect the past is coming back to visit them. Taking its pace from the unshowy performances of Walker and Bhaskar, Unforgotten is a perfect programme for a Thursday night: just a deeply satisfying thing to watch as the cops begin fitting stuff together. The one slightly jarring element is the decision to suddenly edit in frantic guilty flashbacks whenever the cops meet a witness, to let us know They Know Something. Trust the actors and the script to get it across, and trust the audience to work it out. But that’s a small quibble. Without making any fuss, this is the best British crime show on TV at the moment. Modelled on Scandinavian imports, I wish ITV had gone the whole BBC Four hog and put it on as double bills.

Saturday

Imagine…Listen To Me Marlon

9pm, BBC Four

Among the many other remarkable things he did, Marlon Brando left behind an extraordinary archive of personal tape recordings, hundreds of hours documenting thoughts, confessions, self-therapy, self-hypnosis and self-attacks made alone at home over several decades. Given access to this raw psychic treasure trove, director Stevan Riley uses it as basis for his strange, moving, wholly fascinating 2015 documentary, presented tonight under the BBC’s Imagine banner. As Brando’s disembodied voice weaves among archival footage and photographs to lay out a ghostly commentary on his own life, the effect can be like being trapped inside the actor’s head – which also makes a weird phantom appearance, in the shape of a floating Max Headroom-like digital bust, based on a 3D computer model of Brando’s magnificent skull created in the 1980s. As a reminder of why all this matters, it’s followed at 10.40pm by Elia Kazan’s deathless On The Waterfront (1954), with Brando as Terry Malloy, the palooka who coulda been a contender, trapped in the corrupt dockland of Hoboken.