Thursday

Noughts + Crosses

9pm, BBC One/

War Of The Worlds

9pm, Fox UK

A television adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s best-selling series of young adult novels Noughts And Crosses was first announced back in 2016, but delays ensued, including a change in the team charged with bringing the books to the screen. But the hold up has surely worked to the show’s advantage: not simply because the series that has been made is a fresh and cleverly mounted piece of thought-provoking teen drama; but because it appears at a time when the issues it so emphatically deals with – racism and privilege – are being discussed with ever increasing passion and openness. Coming so soon after the concerns raised, again, about lack of diversity in the Oscar and Bafta nominations, the series couldn’t feel more on point.

Not, of course, that these topics are any more timely today than they were in 2001, when Blackman wrote the first book, nor, indeed, in the 1960s and 70s, when she was growing up a black kid in London. Much of the racism experienced by her protagonist Cal, strikingly played by rising star Jack Rowan, is based on her own memories, not only of being the target of outright racists, but also her experiences of a more insidious, unconscious racism; of being constantly judged, suspected, excluded and made to prove herself by people who barely even realised they were doing it.

Peaky Blinders fans who know Rowan from the Brummie gangster saga, but don’t know the gist of Blackman’s dystopian series, might be puzzled by that last paragraph. Rowan is white, so how can he be the butt of the prejudice Blackman describes? This, though, is the entire premise of Noughts + Crosses. In the show’s alternative history, Europe was colonised by an African empire called Aprica hundreds of years ago, and present-day UK – Albion – remains an Aprican outpost. Slavery has been abolished, but the society is still strictly segregated, with lines dawn between a black ruling class, the Crosses, and an oppressed white underclass, the Noughts.

Resentment and rebellion are in the air, however, coming to a head when a white teenager is brutalised by black cops during yet another stop and search operation, and violent voices seek to stoke the tensions. It can be didactic, but the series leads us through the landscape seductively, by offering a classic star-crossed lovers story as focus. Juliet to Cal’s Romeo is Sephy (a terrific Masali Baduza), who, as daughter of the Home Secretary (Paterson Joseph), is firmly part of the establishment. She and Cal knew each other as children – his mother is a trusted servant to her parents. When they bump into each other again as teenagers there is a definite spark, and, in its light, Saphy slowly has her eyes opened to a prejudice previously invisible to her.

The role reversal is a simple trick, and Blackman is hardly the first writer to have employed it. But, blunt as it is, the show’s through-the-looking-glass tactic is effective in magnifying the points it wishes to make. Most effective of all, in fact, in the smallest details, such as when Cal cuts his finger, and is given a “flesh coloured” sticking plaster of a dark brown tone.

Elsewhere tonight comes the arrival of the umpteenth War Of The Worlds. Anybody who made it through the BBC’s recent turgid and weepy version might wonder how another was allowed so soon, but this international co-production was actually broadcast on French TV before it. A present-day adaptation, with a cast including Gabriel Byrne, it follows the carnage across contemporary Europe. As the survivors scatter, it has more to do with The Walking Dead than HG Wells, and, despite opening with more oomph, gets almost as miserable as that BBC fiasco.

DAILY PICKS

Today

McDonald & Dodds

8pm, STV

The ongoing Agatha Christification of British crime TV continues with this cosy new cop show. Set in the most summery and picturesque parts of Bath they could find, Tala Gouveia plays DCI McDonald Tate, a cop from “inner city London” parachuted into the tourist town’s force even though many resent her big city ways. (We know this, because someone mentions it every five minutes.) As sidekick, she’s saddled with sadsack veteran DS Dodds (Jason Watkins), but quickly learns his shabbily unimpressive loser front hides a brilliant crime-solving instinct. In their first whodunit, they’re up against smarmy billionaire design guru Max Crockett (Robert Lindsay) and his horrendous family of suspects. Weakly watchable through the clichés, but it could be more fun. Watkins almost saves it single-handedly with a character pitched between Columbo and Roy Cropper.

Monday

Moving On

2.15pm, BBC One

Liar

9pm, STV

A welcome return for Jimmy McGovern’s anthology Moving On, one of the jewels of BBC daytime, back for an eleventh(!) series. With McGovern as script editor, across the week there will be five new single plays from emerging writers, all linked by the theme of “moving on.” First comes the story of Joe (Tom McKay), a former champion swimmer trying to get his life back together following a jail sentence. Released on home detention, things get complicated when he meets Lisa (Angela Coulby), but doesn’t want to tell her about his curfew. Later, Joanne Froggatt and Katherine Kelly return for a belated sequel to 2017’s Liar, the flashback-ridden crime show that saw Froggatt’s Laura trying to prove she was assaulted by serial sex attacker Dr Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd). Now, he’s been murdered, and Laura is among the suspects.

Tuesday

The Trip To Greece

10pm, Sky 1

Three years since we last saw them in Spain, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are reunited under Michael Winterbottom’s deceptively loose direction for a fourth voyage, beginning with a double bill. As the opening seconds make clear (Brydon straight into a full on, weirdly stirring Anthony Hopkins impression), it’s business as usual. Ostensibly, the pair are travelling through Greece in the sandleprints of Odysseus, while sampling some select restaurants. Along the way, they banter and bicker and do endless impressions, Coogan dreams of Byron while Brydon pricks his pretensions, and the eternal landscapes look stunning. But Winterbottom slips in other concerns, signalled tonight when the two make a reluctant, uncomfortable, fleeting visit to the outskirts of a refugee camp. Some of improvised gags are brilliantly funny – even Coogan can’t stop laughing as Brydon picks him apart, and there’s a tremendous bout of Roger Moore.

Wednesday

The Trouble With Maggie Cole

9pm, STV

A new entry in the Bastard Children Of Broadchurch subgenre, this six-part drama by writer Mark Brotherhood ditches the crime, but otherwise stays true to the template with another tale of secrets and lies coming to light amid the tight knit community of a small town by the sea. The slender story focuses on Maggie (Dawn French), a bustling busybody whose irritating exterior presumably hides a heart of gold. Casting herself as the town’s historian (she actually runs a gift shop), her vanity is tickled when a radio journalist asks her for an interview, during which he plies her with gin, and gets her to dish the dirt on her friends and neighbours. Hard to justify six hours of this, but there’s a good cast, with French joined by Mark Heap and the ever-excellent Julie Hesmondhaigh, who deserves her own series.

Friday

Babylon Berlin

9pm, Sky Atlantic

A third series for this admirably flashy, slightly berserk and seductively styled period crime series, based on the books by Volker Kutscher. Set during the Weimar period, it has the same precarious, detailed, end-of-the-word feeling familiar from between-the-wars Berlin pieces like Mephisto and, increasingly, Cabaret – a noirish detective story that would really like to be a full on decadent musical. As with the previous seasons, we’re still in 1929, but time is marching ominously on, and we’ve now almost reached the moment of the Wall Street crash. An opening flashforward actually shows the ripples from the world’s collapsing stock markets hitting Germany, with our hero, vice squad detective Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), caught up in the shockwave. But the story proper begins several weeks earlier, when he is called to investigate a death at a film studio.

Saturday

Hilary Mantel: Return To Wolf Hall

9pm, BBC Two

To mark the publication of The Mirror And The Light, the eagerly awaited final novel in her Tudor trilogy on the life of Thomas Cromwell, this profile of Hilary Mantel was filmed with exclusive access to the writer during the six months in the run up to publication. A biographical film presented in the voice and style of its subject, Mantel discusses the Cromwell books, why she wrote them, how they have changed her life, and her fascination with her anti-hero. Simultaneously, drawing on the themes of the Wolf Hall series, she explores her private world, both real and imaginative, and delves into her own past to describe a vivid and active imagination from an early age, and divulge a tale of growing up with a dark family secret.