Sunday

Poldark 9pm, BBC One

The Loch 9pm, STV

In these timeshifted days, it’s no longer supposed to matter whether two (or more) television programmes are going out on different channels at the same time. But just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose there are still among us some weary souls who actually still like the old ritual of slumping down on a Sunday night with a regular programme to escape into, before the onslaught of the working week begins again. If you’re a member of this imaginary olde worlde fraternity, you might already have decided to make The Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4) your dependable Sunday night date. But if you’re the sort who loves blouse-ripping romance as much as icy feminist dystopian parables, you face a dilemma tonight, as Poldark suddenly comes brooding back onto BBC One. And, if you also enjoy daft, Broadchurchian, Scandi-lite crime sagas featuring gruesome murders and suspects lined up like buses, then you face a three-way split, as a new serial-killer mystery, The Loch, splashes down on ITV. Of the trio of dramas vying for ratings in the sacrosanct Sunday 9pm slot, The Loch might come off worst, if only because The Handmaid’s Tale has had a few weeks to build an audience, and Poldark already has its fevered fanbase. It is also, it must be said, the worst of the three programmes. It’s not bad, but it’s highly generic, a post-Nordic boil-in-the-bag, whose chief interest is that the sadism comes simmered in the picturesque waters of Loch Ness.

Along those bonnie banks, we find a deceptively simple and tight-knit community who like to keep bitter and complicated secrets from one another in such a way that you know they’re doing it. Among them is police detective Annie Redford (Laura Fraser, doing a good job stomping around looking harassed), who faces the biggest case of her career when the local gay piano teacher turns up dead at the foot of the local rugged cliff.

A forensic examination later, it turns out he didn’t fall. Nor was he merely pushed. He had his brains surgically pulled out through his nostrils. Add to this that a human heart from another, unknown, victim has been discovered – and that there’s a body in the loch no-one knows about yet – and the investigation is soon judged too big for the natives. Thus, an outsider is called in, DCI Mrs No-Nonsense From Glasgow (the ever-excellent Siobhan Finneran). The show adds some nice site-specific touches – bored village teenagers get kicks by creating a fake “monster carcass” from bloody offal to hoax tourists – but the storyline is so generic it might as well be happening anywhere near water. Nessie herself doesn’t feature, at least, that’s what she told me.

Meanwhile, in Poldarkland, there’s more stirring clifftop galloping going on than ever before. Some of it involves Drippy Elizabeth, who is very pregnant with Evil George Warleggan’s spawn (unless it’s Ross’s baby, of course), which is causing no end of moody tension. Best of all, there is a lunar eclipse brewing, rendering Cornwall a hellish occult night planet, all swollen blood-orange-red and swirling black, as if a Denis Wheatley adaptation could begin any minute.

This third series arrives at an odd time. Poldark is perfect for the dark Sundays of winter and autumn, but has been timeshifted to summer, in order to prevent it clashing inconveniently again with that other period drama from the same production company, Mammoth Screen, starring Jenna Coleman – Lego Victoria, I think it’s called. So maybe the old ratings slots still matter after all. Really, though, when it comes to Poldark on Sundays, there’s still no competition.

Monday

Fearless

9pm, STV

It’s a good week for new dramas about women investigating shady, twisty crimes: alongside The Loch (Sunday) and Riviera (Thursday), this series led by Helen McCrory completes the hat-trick. She plays Emma Banville, a maverick human rights lawyer with a cool leather jacket, a big retro motor and a habit for smoking cheroots. Known for taking on lost causes and winning, she agrees to look into the case of Kevin Russell, who’s serving life for murdering a schoolgirl 14 years before, a crime he swears he didn’t commit, even though he confessed at the time. As soon as she begins nosing into the old killing, she begins unearthing discrepancies, and alarm bells start ringing in the conspiratorial corridors of power. Soon, the cops, the security services and other shadowy figures are on her trail – and one of them is played by Michael Gambon, so you know it’s serious. Patrick Harbinson’s script touches topics like Syria and Islamophobia, but at heart it’s a traditional, pulpy, paranoid thriller, and decent watching. Weird to see John Bishop cast as Emma’s husband, though.

Tuesday

Jo Cox: Death Of An MP

9pm, BBC Two

The brutal murder of Labour MP Jo Cox on June 16 2016, one week before the EU Referendum vote, shocked the nation. But it also seems true that, as a country, we have yet to have a truly serious national discussion about the tensions and elements around it. Certainly, it’s hard to believe there wouldn’t have been more, and ongoing, discussion in the media had her killer been non-white, or professed allegiance to perverted religious extremism rather than perverted “Britain First” extremist politics. One year on, this documentary on her death is detailed, sober, moving and painful to watch. Interviews with Cox’s husband Brendan, and family and friends including Fazila Aswat and Sandra Major – the colleagues who were with her when she was attacked, and recall events with dreadful clarity – underline what a loss she was. Meanwhile, there is a forensic portrait of the lonely, pathetic, somewhat damaged life of her killer. This might be the most important hour on TV this week. For all its clarity, it raises more questions than gives answers.

Wednesday

Billy Connolly: Portrait Of A Lifetime

9pm, BBC One

Presented by Mr C himself, this wonderful film documents BBC Scotland’s project to mark his 75th birthday by commissioning three new portraits of the man by artists Jack Vettriano, Rachael Maclean and the great John Byrne. Along the way, as Connolly returns to his old stomping ground to meet with and sit for the artists, and revisits childhood haunts like the Kelvingrove Art Gallery And Museum, it also becomes in passing a film about Glasgow then and now. In between performance footage from across his career, including his most recent stand-up shows, Connolly discusses the effects of getting older, of suffering Parkinson’s Disease, and of coming from this city: “It’s like that, Glasgow. You don’t get guys who are famous for coming from Edinburgh …” The best stuff, though, is his interaction with the artists, especially his delight in Maclean’s “off its head” work and the deep-fried Bonnie Prince Billy picture she creates of him; and his tender reconnection with his dear old pal Byrne, who first painted him in the 1970s.

Thursday

Riviera

9pm, Sky Atlantic

Set amid the sleek mansions, blue swimming pools and dark deeds of the super-rich enclaves along the French Riviera, this big, sun-soaked 10-part murder mystery is the TV equivalent of a fat, suncream-stained beach read, but there are serious talents slumming behind the camera, including creator Neil Jordan and writer John Banville. The always undervalued Julia Stiles leads the cast as Georgina Clios, younger second wife of a billionaire banker and art collector (Anthony LaPaglia), who begins to realise how little she knows about her husband when he is killed alongside some oligarchs in a mysterious yacht explosion. (Or is he?) Slowly, she finds herself investigating. The excellent Lena Olin co-stars as the ex-wife, a woman made entirely from sunglasses. Anyone who loved The Night Manager for its mix of decadent billionaires doing bad things in glamorous locations will find a lot to like – indeed, as far as glitzy production values go, it makes the BBC series look like an episode of Only Fools And Horses. Good, glitzy, escapist trash.

Friday

Count Arthur Strong

8.30pm, BBC One

What the world needs now is great blasts of cheap and cheerful sweet and stupid, and, for that, Arthur Strong is your guy. Tonight’s tiny adventure begins with the news that Arthur has landed one of his intermittent sort-of acting jobs, playing a regular role with a local outfit who specialise in putting on murder-mystery events. The work has put a spring in his step, but Michael and the rest of the café crew are beginning to wonder whether it’s time for them to tell him that maybe he isn’t quite the great thespian he imagines, and perhaps should finally give up his dreams of a showbiz career. Soon, however, they have

a bigger problem to deal with. Following a bump on

the head, Arthur forgets who he is, and wakes up

convinced that he’s actually the character he was playing in his most recent performance: a high-ranking, no-nonsense police detective, the kind of old-school cop who speaks his mind and goes with his gut. Daft business ensues all around.

Saturday

Pitch Battle

7.30pm, BBC One

Every few months, in order to keep Gareth Malone in the style to which he has grown accustomed, the BBC gamely tries to get the nation excited about choirs of different styles, despite the scientific fact that – while they look like great fun to be part of, and good luck to everyone involved in them – nobody who had an option would ever choose to sit and actually listen to a choir for more than three minutes. In this new six-part reality contest,

Mel Giedroyc (aka Mel from Mel and Sue) presents as choirs of various sizes and genres go head-to-head in a series of knockout choral challenges including “a showstopper” and “a themed riff-off”. The judges deciding on who will progress in the competition are former choirgirl Kelis, “Superstar Guest Judge Bebe Rexha,” and, astonishingly, Gareth Malone. Tonight’s hopefuls include an a cappella group from King’s College London, a Polish jazz group, the London International Gospel Choir, a female soul combo, and, of course, a Welsh choir.

LAST WEEK

This section of the newspaper went to print before what would in any ordinary election week have been the biggest TV event of the past seven days: the rolling, through-the-night coverage as the results come trickling then tumbling in, a slow-slow, quick-quick marathon that usually throws up a fistful of startling events, memorable turning points and striking images, even if it’s only David Dimbleby caught in flagrante delicto with his legendary Mars Bar, or Jeremy Vine disappearing over the event horizon, moving ever closer toward his own incomprehensible digital Nirvana.

Whatever happened across the long day’s journey from Thursday night into Friday morning, though, I still suspect that if there was a single moment this week that I will remember in years to come, it was a small young woman in big statement heels, standing alone on a stage, singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

Musically, Aria Grande isn’t really my cup of tea, and, in general, I reckon there should maybe be a moratorium on anyone singing that song for a while, especially if they’re going to add extra notes to the melody without reason. This, of course, matters not a single damn. Arguing about what counts as good or bad pop music – about whether Oasis are in any way qualitatively better than Coldplay, and why anyone could actually care when you could be listening to Smokey Robinson instead – is a fun hobby when you have the time, but had nothing to do with the One Love Manchester concert, although pop music itself did, as “a way of life” that is really the sound of hundreds of thousands of individual ways of living bumping into each other for a moment.

As a sad and wounded but stubborn celebration of pop and all the people who listen in all their different ways for all their different reasons, and for no reason at all, and most of all when they are young – as a testament to pop in all its stupid glory and all its stupid dumbness – the concert worked, even if you didn’t enjoy a single note. Even the cheesiest, most corporate, most cringe-worthy moments felt part and parcel of the whole carnival. And in other places, it became strangely wonderful: taking the stage, Take That surely never seemed such a surging and positive force.

Finally, though, it was Grande and that closing Somewhere Over The Rainbow that stood out. In how she stood and sang it and where she stood and sang it, in why she sang it and when she sang it, it was the most poignant rendition since Judy Garland first made it her own in the merry old land of Oz. How many countless dreaming and lonely teenagers in how many generations have given how many heartfelt, show-stopping versions of that song in their bedrooms and on school stages over the past eight decades is impossible to imagine. But, for a moment, it felt like all of them were there, and it felt like not enough of them were here.