Wednesday

Ackley Bridge

8pm, Channel 4

On paper, Ackley Bridge shouldn’t work simply because it’s trying so hard to hit so many buttons so bluntly on the nose. It’s a series practically jumping up and down screaming “Look! Topical!” Yet it does work, thanks to the way the serious care and good intentions that have gone into the planning are balanced, and sometimes knocked off balance, by the rough, raucous energy of the writing, the filming and the performances. It might not be a modern classic, but it’s one of the liveliest, timeliest, most welcome and most interesting mainstream dramas this year.

Here’s the schematic set-up: in the depressed Yorkshire mill town of the title, the white and Asian communities have long lived side by side, but largely separately, each culture keeping to its own. Now, though, the two local high schools – one largely white; one largely Asian– have merged to form a single new integrated academy, Ackley Bridge College. As the new multicultural endeavour opens its doors, the question is, can’t everyone just get along?

Timing is everything here, in more ways than one. The six-part series is going out in the 8pm slot Channel 4 usually reserves for cheap documentaries about eating, houses, hotels, and hording. It’s a signal that this isn’t quite one of the channel’s gritty 9pm issue dramas, but something else, floating in a spot that’s friendly to lifestyle dilemmas, soap operas and in spitting distance of the grown-up end of kids’ TV.

At first glance, the most obvious influence is the BBC’s school-soap Waterloo Road (with all its Grange Hill ghosts), on which Ackley Bridge’s producer Alex Lamb previously worked. Dividing time similarly between the trials, troubles and love lives of staff and pupils, fans of that will find much they recognise. Meanwhile, from beyond the watershed, comes the influence of the Paul Abbott of the first, best, two series of Shameless: that blending of a clear-eyed view and rowdy humour, of tenderness and coarseness. (Two of Ackley Bridge’s co-creators, Kevin Erlis and Malcolm Campbell, are graduates of Shameless’s writers’ room.)

But lobbed into this come two more vital ingredients. One is the perspective on British Pakistani life brought by the show’s other co-creator, Ayub Khan-Din, the writer of East Is East. And finally, and crucially, the vision of director Penny Woolcock, who, in both fiction films and documentaries, has spent much of her career considering poverty, housing, youth, class and race in Britain, particularly in her excellent “Tina” trilogy about a Leeds estate, itself a forerunner to Shameless, the final film in which, Mischief Night, shares specific themes with this new series.

That’s a lot going on, and Ackley Bridge’s opening episode is almost frantically busy. But two storylines emerge forcefully. One follows a disruptive white boy, Jordan (played by Samuel Bottomley, with a strikingly odd, off-centre approach) who seems determined to hijack any harmony. The other involves neighbours Nas (Amy-Leigh Hickman) and Missy (Poppy Lee Friar), lifelong neighbours who have always been best pals – until their schools merge, they meet each other’s other friends, and a culture clash suddenly hits them.

It’s in this relationship that Woolcock comes into her own – she brings feeling and a fleeting summer night magic to a scene of the pair sitting on a sofa dumped in a skip – and it’s here also that the series pitches its banner. Timing again. After recent events in the north of England, this little programme about two teenage girls, one Muslim, one not, trying to work out friendship while the world churns around them suddenly feels important.

Sunday

American Epic

9pm, BBC Four

The most damaging thing to this documentary series (and others like it) is its producers’ misguided belief that in order to make old music interesting they have to include footage of contemporary musicians recording bad new versions of it. (For more of this, see American epic: The Sessions, 11pm Friday.) That aside, tonight’s closing episode is to be cherished if only because it’s the only place on TV this week you’ll find the great and gentle bluesman Mississippi John Hurt, whose tale makes up the final section of the film. After cutting some rare sides as a young man in the 1920s, Hurt returned to farming in his tiny town of Avalon during the Depression, only to be rediscovered as a lost legend in his 70s by the 1960s folk revival generation, playing to adoring young crowds at the Newport Folk Festival of 1963. Elsewhere tonight, there’s a consideration of the connection between Hawaii and country music, as carried in the strings of the steel guitar; and an exploration of the strange stew of Cajun.

Monday

Cosby: Fall Of An American Icon

9pm, BBC Two

This week, Bill Cosby is due to stand trial on three charges of sexual assault, amid a swirl of accusations about scores of similar crimes involving the drugging and raping of dozens of women over decades. It’s one of the most shocking falls from grace in recent American culture. Since the 1960s, Cosby was seen as one of the brightest role models to African-Americans, and a philanthropist for black causes. He was all the more beloved because so much of his sly, fast-witted but laid-back humour was about and for children, a wholesome, positive vibe that continued into his groundbreaking 1980s sitcom, The Cosby Show – the series that saw him dubbed “America’s Dad”. But stories concerning attacks on women had circulated for years, to no effect, until 2014, when dozens of women came forward. Because the cases happened so long ago, however, Cosby will face trial for only one. Thandie Newton narrates this documentary, which explores why it took so long for the allegations to be taken seriously.

Tuesday

Broken

9pm, BBC One

Following the Manchester attack, the BBC postponed broadcasting Jimmy McGovern’s new drama, about a Catholic priest in a town in northern England, meaning we’re only at episode two tonight. Father Michael (Sean Bean) knows that the desperate Christina (Anna Friel) kept her mother’s death secret for several days – and why – and is now concerned with getting her to admit the truth to the authorities over what she has done. Meanwhile, he has other problems to contend with, including a new parishioner, Roz (Paula Malcolmson), who, similarly drowning in debt, reveals a terrible decision; and a church regular who is in despair over her son, recently released from a care unit where he was being treated for schizophrenia. This is McGovern on his best form, charging sad and angry at problems people are struggling to deal with in austerity UK, while wrapping the issues up in a gritty, humorous, near-soapy narrative that keeps you watching. It’s bolstered by a magnificent performance by Bean, light but soulful, and sharing terrific scenes with Adrian Dunbar as his confessor.

Thursday

Election 2017

Frankie Boyle’s New World Order

10.30pm, BBC Two

Of course, it’s clear now: the real reason Theresa May decided to throw this surprise snap election wing ding was so that we could all get to share in the experience of watching David Dimbleby host the coverage through the night again. For maybe the last time, the Dimblebot is leading the BBC’s coverage on BBC Two from 12.05am, but it’ll probably be about 3.30am when he begins to wander off-message, starts eating Mars Bars, and the magic really happens. Meanwhile, Glenn Campbell is manning the fort for BBC Scotland from 9.55pm on BBC One, while Bernard Ponsonby leads the charge on STV (9.55pm). Channel 4 is muscling in on the act, too, with its Alternative Election Night (from 9pm), chaired by Jeremy Paxman, Richard Osman and David Mitchell. With all this going on, it’s a good night for Frankie Boyle to launch his new series, New World Order, in which he and guests including Sara Pascoe attempt to get to grips with recent events and, possibly, be funny about them.

Friday

The Summer Of Love: How Hippies Changed The World

9pm, BBC Four

It begins with the requisite sounds of Hendrix and The Zombies, and the familiar footage of brightly dressed and semi-naked young things freaking out in the park with flowers in their hair. But while it takes the 1967 Summer Of Love as its focus, this two-part documentary digs deeper, into the strange and radical mix of influences that fed the fomenting American counter-culture of the 1960s. In this first film, the development of the hippy is traced back through the 1940s Californian drop-out cult known as “the nature boys” (whose haunting theme song was famously recorded by Nat King Cole), all the way to their inspiration in the 19th-century German sect of wandering naturalists called Lebensreform. In the States, Lebensreform-style back-to-the-land philosophy gradually merged with growing interest in Eastern mysticism, as touted by maverick British thinkers like Alastair Crowley and Aldous Huxley. But the big explosion came with the arrival of a wonder drug first developed and tested in secret by the CIA: LSD.

Saturday

Doctor Who

7.15pm, BBC One

Sherlock gentleman Mark Gatiss takes over the writing for tonight’s episode, a cute story with a throwback vibe, featuring beloved, scaly-armoured Classic Who monsters the Ice Warriors. For some reason that scooted by so fast I missed it, The Doctor, Bill and Tacked-on Nardole are observing a NASA mission to send advanced cameras to Mars, when some unexpected findings beneath the surface prompt them to leap in the Tardis and rush back to the red planet circa the late-1800s. There, in the underground tunnels, they find a lost troop of Victorian soldiers who have somehow travelled to Mars on a secret mission, and decided to colonise the place as part of the Empire while they’re at it. But their activities are just about to awaken a sleeping hive of Ice Warriors and their hissing empress, who have a very different view regarding whose planet it is. Decent fun, with a few nods that old Who heads will appreciate, though not as sinister as it could have been.

Last Week

It was Chris Morris, in the glory days of The Day Today, who first dismantled Jeremy Paxman’s pantomime bully approach to hosting political interviews on TV, a macho makeover of late Robin Day, in which current affairs are simply the dull pretext for doling out sneering humiliation to whatever political weirdo is dangled opposite you. But it wasn’t until The Thick Of It that the essence of Paxman was conclusively captured. The immortal line was spoken, of course, by Malcolm Tucker, who summed it up in 18 words: “What are you gonna do when he pulls that big rubbery horse face of mock incredulity at you?”

More to the point, what are you gonna you do when your entire shtick has been laid bare like that? Where else is left to go? In Paxman’s case – to judge by his strange manifestation as grand inquisitor on May V Corbyn Live: The Battle For Number 10 (Channel 4/ Sky) – his answer has been to gamely admit it’s a fair cop, thankfully abandon any pretence at taking it seriously, and throw himself into mad extremes of ballooning self-parody.

Audiences might have come away from the first of the week’s big TV election dust ups on Monday with a recollection that Jeremy Corbyn seemed more of a human being than the Theresa May hand-rod puppet that the Jim Henson Creature Shop had supplied for the evening. But the most vivid memories were surely of Paxman’s pungent solo performance of his greatest hits album: jamming out freestyle singalong megamix versions of all the old the boredom, the interruptions, the repeated questions and the sardonic ejaculations.

Maybe he was just unhappy at having to sit cooped up talking to politicians once more. Since he started pottering around Channel 4, Paxman has been allowed to go free-range, out in the open, contentedly presenting his imaginatively titled documentary on rivers, Rivers With Jeremy Paxman, in which he cruises the UK accosting random waterways. (“Call yourself a river?”) To see him gambolling around on that is to see a different man: a lighter man; a happier man; a man who probably thought he would never have to think about Michael Gove ever again.

So, sure, Paxo’s showy paroxysms – the big rubbery horse face of mock incredulity raised to the power of Pi – might have obscured everything else that happened during the May V Corbyn interviews. But don’t blame him. He’s tasted freedom. He doesn’t want to come back in. He’d rather be galloping out there, wind in his mane, running wild, running free, rolling on the river. And, to give him his due, the big rubbery horse face can still hit home. When turned to May on Monday with the exploding whinny of “A blowhard who collapses at the first sign of gunfire!” it was pretty sharp. But the words seemed to echo even louder on Wednesday night, howling around the podium where May’s shoes so conspicuously failed to stand for The BBC Election Debate.