Today

Belgravia

9pm, STV

Good news insomniacs: Julian Fellowes is back with another version of Downton Abbey, except not as popular. If that mild dose of COVID 19 you’ve been trying isn’t proving quite enough to sap your will to stay awake, Belgravia is just the cough mixture to send you into dreamland, where toffs are toffs, and everyone knows their place, even if some of them don’t like it much.

Unless I missed one while I was sneezing, Belgravia is Fellowes’s first full series since Doctor Thorne, the 2016 number you’ve forgotten with Tom Hollander as a doctor in big collars. But that was an Anthony Trollope adaptation, and this marks a return to the full, undiluted Fellowes Educational TV Fun experience.

Set in the most exciting parts of the 1840s, Belgravia marks a merciless expansion of the Downton territory: instead of one big house where lines are strictly drawn between the classes, even though some of them don’t like it much, it offers an entire exclusive district of houses like that – a kind of Uptown Downton.

Belgravia is the affluent London ’hood of squares and terraces developed in the early 19th century by the great Thomas Cubitt, the master builder who started out as a ship’s carpenter. Following his work on Tavistock Square and other ventures, Cubitt designed Belgravia as a spangled city of the rich, and, indeed, it was where all the city’s most prestigious citizens did come to live.

But, wait, how do I come by this deep historical knowledge? Because, as is the way in any Fellowes’s script worth its salt, the characters speak little but reams of brittle dialogue explaining exactly what’s happening to each other, even though they all already know it, as in this subtle exchange between Lady Hoitington-Tot-Tot (Harriet Walter) and Mrs Low-Born-But-Secretly-Clever-And-Proud (Tamsin Greig), in whom she has taken curious interest:

“The great Thomas Cubitt! Heavens. I assume he was no longer a ship’s carpenter by that time.”

“You are right. He started as a carpenter, but, after that, they worked on Tavistock Square, and various other ventures.”

“Until they built Belgravia. This spangled city for the rich. Where we all live now. Well, what a story.”

What a story, indeed. But before the action hotfoots it to Belgravia itself, we begin with the obligatory flashback to Brussells. It is 1815, and the Duchess Of Poshmond is throwing a ball for the Duke Of Wellington, who is wondering whether he will soon have to fight Napoleon at Waterloo. (Spoiler: he will.) It is here we first meet Mrs Low-Born-But-Secretly-Clever-And-Proud and her husband, Charlie Oik (Philip Glenister), a rough diamond who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps through his skill as a merchant, gaining a fearsome reputation as Wellington’s victualler for keeping the troops supplied with Mars Bars.

It is here, too, that we will learn some of the secret wounds and driving ambitions that will eventually take this couple into the heart of London high society, for the great and mighty to cock their snoots at them, the fools.

Christ, it’s tedious. Without even the hysterical opening shot of a big dog’s bum that everyone loved Downton for, Belgravia resembles a period drama parody left waiting forever for the actual jokes to turn up. Fellowes does his usual job, stating obvious themes right on top (marrying for love is better than marrying for money; you should judge people on who they are and what they do, not their social status), then restating them, while ensuring there is nothing else going on at any other level. To their credit, the terrific cast manage to deliver lines without lapsing into a coma, although they often seem like animatronic guides in a historical theme park attraction. Probably be a hit.

DAILY PICKS

Monday

Westworld

Sky Atlantic

The time-twisting sci-fi reboot that, when you get right down to it, still isn’t half as memorable as Yul Brynner simply walking down a corridor, returns for a third series. The last season, once you figured it out, ended with two of those rebellious android “hosts” escaping the confines of their trashed themepark universe and heading out into the real world of an America some thirty years from now. Hell bent on vengeance Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) smuggled out with her the “pearls” containing the consciousness of several other of her artificial peers. Meanwhile, back in the confines of the Delos resort, we encounter another new setting, based on fascist Italy. Old faces like Ed Harris and Thandie Newton return, even though some of them are sort of dead, joined by new cast members including Vincent Cassel, and Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul.

Tuesday

Harry Birrell Presents Films Of Love & War 10pm, BBC Scotland Offering a snapshot view on some of the most tumultuous years of the 20th century, this beautiful documentary is collaged together from 400 films left behind in his garden shed at his death by Harry Birrell, an amateur film maker and photographer who was born in Paisley in 1918. At the age of 10, he was given a cinecamera as a gift, sparking an enduring love of filmmaking that would see him chronicle the decades to come: capturing life as a young man in the late-1930s, and, particularly, his sometimes traumatic experiences during the Second World War, both at home and overseas in India. Displaying a gifted eye for composition, the films are fascinating, near hypnotic, and, especially in the colour reels, intensely vivid. Birrell’s granddaughter Carina guides us through the collection, while actor Richard Madden narrates from Birrell’s private diaries.

Wednesday

Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans

9pm, BBC Four

In 1971, Steve McQueen was the American’s most powerful movie star, and he used his position to make the kind of film he really wanted to make: Le Mans, a drama about the famed 24-hour auto race. This evocative documentary by Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna details how the film became a dangerously all-consuming obsession for McQueen: simultaneously a big-budget Hollywood vehicle, and a weird, hard, private, roaring, relentless thing, which turned out to be a disaster on release. With a terse, minimal plot, the movie is really all about engines, wheels and speed, and the stories of McQueen’s increasingly erratic, paranoid behaviour during its filming are legion. The documentary never quite captures the full madness of its making – but for that, we’d need David Cronenberg directing, with a script by JG Ballard.

Thursday

Mark Kermode's Secrets Of Cinema

9pm, BBC Four

Just when you thought it was safe, the BBC’s cinema guy has thought of another handful of movie genres to explain to us. Later in this new series, he will be turning his beady quiff on spy movies and films about British history, but he begins tonight with the form that has come to dominate the multiplexes of the 21st century: the superhero movie. Yet while the current Marvel epoch of popular cinema has produced global hits and unprecedented box office, comic book adaptations are nothing new at the pictures, with the first wave appearing over eight decades ago. Kermode begins by considering the Saturday morning serials in which Batman and Superman first strode the screen – and the earlier movies they drew upon. Features clips from the 1960s Batman TV show, and, for that reason alone, it’s a good thing.

Friday

The Story Of Ready Steady Go!

9pm, BBC Four

With its stylishly chic mod minimalism, its interview and fashion segments, and its emphasis on the kids, the ITV network’s 1960s music magazine Ready Steady Go was always hipper than its BBC rival, Top Of The Pops. This fine little documentary recounts how the show revolutionised the idea of youth TV, and helped document the first great explosion of British pop by capturing acts including The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones and Sandie Shaw in their first flush. Contributors include original producer Vicki Wickham and the programme’s pioneering director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, along with contributions from Annie Nightingale, Eric Burdon, Supremes legend Mary Wilson and Martha Reeves. Stay tuned for the hip-shaking compilation The Best Of Ready Steady Go (11pm), featuring Beatles, Stones, Dusty Springfield, Otis Redding and more.

Saturday

Diego Maradona

9pm, Channel 4

A premier for this enthralling, trashy, flashy and insightful documentary on the divisive, messed up Argentinian football wizard, directed by Asif Kapadia, continuing the theme of his empathetic profiles of Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse. Kapadia sets the pace in an opening that resembles a hair raising Hollywood car chase, but turns out to be archive of Maradona making his way to Napoli’s stadium to be introduced to the roaring fans following his 1984 transfer from Barcelona, beginning a key phase of his remarkable career. Around the story of that seven-year stint, Kapadia sketches Maradona’s life, from the street kid in the slums of Buenos Aires, to his peak as the world’s most expensive player, and the simultaneous dive into addiction. New interviews with Maradona and many others are complemented by a wealth of riveting archive footage.