PICK OF THE WEEK

Luther

Tuesday, 9pm, BBC One

Here’s a sample of dialogue from the new Luther: “What did he do with the heart?” “He ate it.”

Here’s another: “Medic says he ate the tongue, Boss.”

And just one more: “How much of the brain did he eat?”

Personally speaking, I’d say that he ate most of the brain, and he did it long ago, before writer Neil Cross even sat down with his chopsticks to type out the first series of his cop show, which landed on our doormats like baloney drenched in Dior Sauvage back in 2010.

Fans will recall that, aside from its main mission, which is first and foremost to always make Idris Elba look good, initial servings of Luther revolved largely around the strange rapport between Elba’s legendarily edgy copper (“The man’s nitro-glycerine!”) and Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson), a genius psychokiller whose main weapon was her ability to annoy the living skin off you from 100 metres, a relationship Cross subtly lifted wholesale from the Clarice-Hannibal romance in The Silence Of The Lambs, then cunningly disguised by reversing genders, and writing it worse.

This Luther-Alice business didn’t make any sense, but, given that none of the characters were intriguing, believable or entertaining, that the plots came out of a fire-damaged Hollywood Thrillers Christmas Cracker set, and that the series displayed neither an attitude to nor interest in the business of being alive, it was all that kept it running. Without it, after all, the only thing they’d have left is the holy duty to make Elba look good, which they could have achieved simply by having him emerge from a big rotating box, then standing there, spinning slowly, while unseen voices chanted “Luther! Edgy! Sooo edgy!”, like an edgy version of the old Camberwick Green titles.

Cross essentially admitted this with the stunning conclusion to the third series in 2013. After wading chest-deep through steaming implausibility for four hours, it ended with Luther and Alice staring at each other and literally saying: “Now what?” – a moment that played less like a spine-tingling cliff-hanger than a despairing confession that Cross just couldn’t go on making this stuff up anymore, and would quite like to go and have a lie down, and maybe think about it again in the morning.

As we return, however, Luther, a man already burdened by the secret knowledge that he is 85 per cent frozen haddock, is facing the most devastating news of his existence: Alice can’t make it this series, because she’s in America earning more by having an affair on HBO with Jimmy McNulty, Elba’s old chum from those happy days on The Wire.

Welcome, then, to Luther: The Camberwick Green Situation. As the dialogue quoted suggests, to fluff out this two-part frolic in the absence of Alice, Cross has fallen back hard on other bits from his Thomas Harris paperbacks, but he’s spiced things up with a delicate contemporary misunderstanding of how spyware works. A cannibal computer hacker is loose, managing to be depressingly vile without being interesting, and the cops are getting so confused they start forgetting to wear gloves at crime scenes after the second corpse turns up.

There is, clearly, only one man edgy enough for the job. “Crikey,” gasps DCI Hapless Milquetoast when he seeks Luther out in his brooding seclusion, a cottage built on the very edge of a crumbling cliff. “Pretty close to the edge.” You get the idea. And if you don’t, you will by the end, because it’s the only one they have.

Sunday

The World According To Kenny Everett

10pm, STV

There are no sleighbells, but this affectionate portrait of the maniacally inventive DJ and TV comedian is seasonal: Everett was born (as Maurice Cole) Christmas Day 1944. The tribute gives him his due as one of Britain’s great radio pioneers, from his time on pirate stations, when he was the first in the world to play Strawberry Fields, sent hand-delivered by chums The Beatles, to the early Radio 1, when his between-song goonery with multi-tracked tapes was as popular as the records. Subsequently, his dayglo TV series of the late 1970s and early 80s managed to be simultaneously groaningly old-fashioned (all lingerie and saucy postcard gags) and genuinely pioneering (innovative use of video; snotty disregard for form; rapid off-the-cuff anarchy), with Kate Bush and David Bowie lining up to participate. Among interviews with collaborators like Barry Cryer and Billy Connolly, there’s insight into Everett’s personal life from Cleo Rocos, his sister Cate, his wife Lee, and Peter Brown, the Beatles inner circle member who was his first real boyfriend.

Monday

Inside Einstein’s Mind: The Enigma Of Space And Time 9pm, BBC Four When he was 16, Albert Einstein began thinking about light waves: specifically, what might happen if he could move fast enough to catch up with one. What would he see? “He said it caused him such anxiety as he walked around, his palms would sweat,” comments his biographer Walter Isaacson. “Now: you and I may remember what was causing our palms to sweat at age 16 – and it wasn’t a light beam. But that’s why he’s Einstein...” It was this thought that set Einstein on the path to his greatest work, General Relativity, published in 1915, when he was 36. Marking the 100th anniversary of the theory that still guides our understanding of the way space, time and gravity interact on a universal scale, or something, this documentary lays out Einstein’s thinking and its meaning with lots of easy dramatic reconstructions and a Don’t-Panic narration from David Tennant. It’s all so friendly and approachable that you’ll understand everything – right up until the moment you don’t, and your palms start sweating.

Wednesday

Love You To Death: A Year Of Domestic Violence 9pm, BBC Two As quizzical series like Lefties, Jews and Women have shown, Vanessa Engle is among our finest documentary makers, but this exceptional, often distressing new film might be her most starkly powerful. The year in question is 2013, when, as an opening title tells us, 86 women in Britain were killed by their male partner or ex-partner. What Engle does next is take us behind that statistic, throwing a clear, simple and intimate light on some of those deaths and what they meant, through interviews with the parents, siblings, children and friends of the women who died, all clearly still grieving. The victims ranged in age from 23 to 80; they came from widely differing social, ethnic and economic backgrounds; some of the couples had been together for many decades, some had only just met. Engle keeps off-camera, unseen and unheard, letting their voices tell their stories, and framing them amid humdrum, strangely beautiful details of their streets and houses. The result is poignant, hard and sometimes devastating.

Thursday

Hunderby

10pm, Sky Atlantic

It’s probably for the best that this return to Hunderby is only two episodes long. Six minutes into the dark finale of Julia Davis’s grotesque gothic comedy – around about the time that Alexander Armstrong’s Brother Joseph peers from a window upon a desperate drunken figure beating himself with logs in a dark courtyard, and whispers, “Some men find ecstasy in agony…” – I was begging for someone, anyone, to make it all stop. As the deviant housekeeper Dorothy (Davis) continues to orchestrate hideous candlelit hell for all around her, all the stuff that usually goes repressed in period drama comes vomiting up to the surface in ways that are going to be difficult to forget, no matter how hard you try. Rumours that Davis and co-writer Barunka O’Shaughnessy have been taken on as consultants for the next series of Poldark are probably false, but, blimey, it would be an interesting spin.

Friday

Queen: From Rags To Rhapsody

10pm, BBC Four

It has been at least five or six weeks since BBC Four last devoted an entire Friday night to Queen, and, clearly, the alarms have been going off in some high offices. Thus we have a brand new Queen documentary that will soon join all those other Queen documentaries in the ever-circling cloud of Queen documentaries that are destined to be repeated and repeated until there is no one left alive who cares about Queen any more, and then repeated for another few years after that, just to make sure. This one considers their early years, from their initial formation through to creation of Bohemian Rhapsody, the record that guaranteed them a future of having documentaries made about them making it. It is followed, of course, by more Queen, in the shape of what they like to call The Legendary 1975 Concert (11pm), recorded at London’s legendary Hammersmith Odeon on the legendary Christmas Eve of that legendary year.

Saturday

Rudolf Nureyev: Dance To Freedom

8.50pm, BBC Two

It’s always going to be a hard call to make a dramatised documentary about someone like Rudolf Nureyev: basically, who are you going to get to play him? But they’ve got a fairly classy stand-in for this film about the Soviet dancer’s epochal defection to the West, in the shape of Bolshoi Ballet Principal Artem Ovcharenko. Mixing recreations of the dances, dramatised scenes and new interviews, the film pieces together events surrounding Nureyev’s spectacular defection at Paris’s Le Bourget airport during the Kirov’s showcase 1961 tour, the first ever major tour by a Russian ballet company. Among other figures come friends and rivals of Nureyev, including Alla Osipenko, his dancing partner on that tour and Clara Saint, the Paris socialite who helped him escape, and there are contributions from KGB officers who were assigned to such tours, to try and make sure that precisely this kind of thing didn’t happen.