LEAD PREVIEW

Wednesday

Danny Dyer's Right Royal Family

10.45pm, BBC One

Danny Dyer’s Right Royal Family is a rum one, and, like the man himself, not always for the reasons intended.

A two-part documentary that sees Dyer swinging majestically through what we are assured is his family tree, the series is, of course, a sequel to his episode of Who Do You Think You Are, which has become an epoch-defining JFK moment for our straitened times.

In case you’ve just emerged from a coma, or simply have never been interested, the twist ending of Who Does Danny Dyer Think He Is was not, as widely suspected, that he doesn’t think about it at all, but that he was in fact related to both William The Conqueror and Edward III. Equally remarkable, the show demonstrated an ancestral link between the star of 2012’s Run For Your Wife movie and Thomas Cromwell, the cheeky leading man of BBC Two’s trouser-swapping Britromp, Wolf Hall.

What made the programme such a hit, however, setting in motion the deification of Danny Dyer and the remaking of our entire culture in his image, was not simply these unlikely ancestral hook-ups, but Dyer’s reaction to them. This was a seductive cocktail: one part the expected ave-it-smash-it bantz; one part an uncertain self-aggrandisement manifested in the sudden decision to start referring to himself in the third person (“Danny Dyer is a direct descendant of Thomas Cromwell”); and three-parts a genuinely sweet and charming delight, as he got increasingly excited about the whole deal: “Geezer’s got a drawbridge!”

Essentially, the new programme just wants to do all that again, except longer. No harm there, but there is a danger. What worked about Who Does Danny Dyer Think He Is was the surprise of it, and Dyer’s surprise at it. Now, though, it’s all stiff and self-conscious, no matter how many times he promises “a right nutty royal caper.”

In an attempt to get around this, the show tosses in extra revelations, by extending the established Dyer genealogy. In addition to the figures previously mentioned come new names – for instance, Dyer is now also descended from Rollo, Viking ruler of Normandy, and Henry II.

To investigate these connections, he dresses in fake Viking clothes, and walks around Dover castle wearing a crown. But despite Dyer’s best efforts – “what a nutty journey” – none of this proves interesting. However, things change when he gets to exploring his other new ancestor, Louis IX of France, who was not only a king, but also a saint, whose hobbies included collecting holy relics, and branding blasphemer’s lips. (“He’s burning the geezer’s mouth!”)

As Dyer visits Sainte-Chapelle, the shimmering golden-gothic church grampa Louis built to house The Crown Of Thorns, things take on an otherworldly, occult vibration. By this stage, it has already started to feel as if the show is gently preparing us for the news that it has been discovered that Danny Dyer is related to every significant figure in recorded history, simultaneously the zenith and Zelig of all human destiny. But now it becomes like a folk-horror version of The Da Vinci Code, set to reveal that Danny Dyer, the blood of saints singing in his veins, may, in fact, be Christ’s Second Coming.

Where to go from here? My hope is that, for the next series, they focus not on Dyer’s ancestry, but speculate on his future legacy. I see a cosmic spin on Sean Connery’s cult 1970s sci-fi movie Zardoz: the UK has regressed to Neanderthal tribes cowering from great stone Dany Dyer heads that fly around the sky shouting “Bish!” Dyer himself would play the man who rebels, in a big nappy. Proper nutty.

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Sunday January

Nolan: Australia's Maverick Artist

9pm, BBC Four

A profile of Sidney Nolan, whose vast and diverse output made him one of the central figures of world art across the 20th century, and arguably the most important modernist Australia ever produced. Born into a working class family in 1917, Nolan, who died in 1992, became a leading light of the Melbourne art and intellectual circles as a young man, but it was his passion for travel that saw him break onto the world stage, eventually settling in London in the 1950s as part of a wide, wild circle of artists, writers and musicians. His homeland always remained central to his work, however – alongside drought-ridden landscapes, Nolan is best known for his Ned Kelly paintings, making an abstract icon out of the outlaw icon’s homemade armour.

Monday

True Detective

9pm, Sky Atlantic

It’s episode three, and this time-shifting story doesn’t seem in any hurry to speed up. In the 1980 sections, detectives Hays and West (Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff) probe the murder/ abduction, uncovering new leads out in the Arkansas woods. In 1990, we meet the older West for the first time, and begin to glimpse the impact the case has had on Hays’s career. Meanwhile, in 2015, Hays is struggling to accept a diagnosis of dementia, and has old ghosts to face when it begins to look like the cops failed to follow some of that evidence they unearthed three decades before. Despite the excellent performances, there’s a spark missing. It’s still hard to care much about the plot, and difficult to say whether the chronological trickery is bogging the story down, or disguising how thin it is.

Tuesday

The National Television Awards 2019

7.30pm, STV

Golden gong season continues with, it says here, “the UK’s leading TV awards event.” Now in its 24th year, the National Television Awards stands out for being one of the few where results are actually decided by viewers. There’s a new category this year: “New Drama,” in which the excellent Killing Eve is going to lose out to the fundamentally overrated Bodyguard. Meanwhile, in the boring old Drama section, Peaky Blinders takes on Doctor Who, Call The Midwife, Casualty and Our Girl. Elsewhere, Drama Performance will undoubtedly see the extraordinary Jodie Comer’s mad brilliance in Killing Eve overlooked again. But you have a chance to try and change all that, and all the other categories, including “Best TV Judge”, by voting online at www.nationaltvawards.com – ballot boxes remain open until noon on Tuesday.

Thursday

Tin Star

9pm, Sky Atlantic

A second series for Sky’s import thriller, a slumbering hit that built a steady word of mouth fanbase (and benefitted further from a recent repeat on Channel 4). The most important news is that Tim Roth is back as Jim/Jack, the former London cop who relocated to become police chief of Little Big Bear, a tiny, sunny town way out in the Canadian Rockies. When a sinister big oil company’s designs on the area unleashed a crime wave, Jim took a stand – but, a recovering alcoholic, he had secrets and violent demons of his own lurking. As they came out, the show built a nice mix of breathtaking scenery, by-the-numbers developments, and bloody outbursts of what-the-hell-just-happened. The first series ended with Jim being shot by his own daughter on a remote mountain. As she seeks refuge, a whole new chapter of trouble opens.

Friday

On Guitar – Lenny Kaye!

9pm, BBC Four

It’s the final episode of BBC Four’s faintly amorphous series on “influential instruments,” but, while it’s hard to figure out what the point was supposed to be, it’s been fun to watch, so maybe that was the point. All episodes have benefitted from good presenters, but they’ve saved the best for last – the great Lenny Kaye, who not only knows his chops as Patti Smith’s long-standing right hand man, but also as the music writer and collector who gave the world the essential Nuggets compilation of rare American garage, psych and proto-punk sounds. On his odyssey through the history of the electric guitar, Kaye pays homage to Bo Diddley and Duane Eddy’s pioneering use of the Tremolo pedal and arm, Roger McGuinn’s electric 12-string jingle-jangle, Pete Townshend’s feedback, Jimi Hendrix’s wah-wah, Ry Cooder’s bottleneck, and Keith Richards’s fuzz box.

Saturday

How Art Began With Anthony Gormley

9pm, BBC Two

In this new documentary, the great sculptor travels the globe hunting the earliest known forms of human artistic expression. For many years, it was commonly assumed that art began with the cave paintings of Ice Age Europe dating from tens of thousands of years ago. But recent discoveries around the world have overturned that idea. Gormley believes the drive to create pleasing and meaningful forms has always been an intrinsic part of being human, and has helped drive our evolution. Here, he pieces together the evidence supporting a new story about when humans discovered their creativity. From the Aboriginal rock art of Australia to ancient caves across Indonesia, Spain and France, he finds haunting images created by hunter-gatherers that surprise him with their range of style, ambition, and tenderness.