It is not traditional to mark a bank holiday with a gift, but here you go: Maya Angelou at the BBC (BBC4, Sunday, from 9pm).

Besides a profile by Bonnie Greer and an Imagine from 2017, the evening contains Angelou on Burns, starting at 10pm. If you haven’t seen this 1996 film of the poet, writer and activist’s visit to Burns country you are in for a treat.

Directed by Elly M Taylor, the film follows Angelou from arrival at Glasgow airport to an evening of all things Burns in Dundonald. She is a magnificent sight as she enters the party dressed in a long fur coat and pearls. The fur, like a few other things, is of its time.

Angelou discovered Burns when she was growing up in Arkansas and reading anything she could get her hands on. She immediately felt a bond with the ploughman poet from centuries ago. Both came from nothing, but were destined for greater things.

“A poet transcends race, time and space,” we see Angelou telling a college class at home in America. Burns had never been to Africa, she informs the students, or the fledgling US, yet he was able to write The Slave’s Lament.

Back in Dundonald, guest of honour Angelou hears the songs and poems she adores performed by her fellow Burnsians. There’s a particularly moving moment when one of the gathering sings Sic a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation. “It’s the blues,” says the singer and Angelou couldn’t agree more.

The entertainment is not all one way. Angelou performs The Mask, a poem that was inspired by The Twa Dugs and takes as its subject a black maid she sees on a bus. “Seventy years in these folks’ world, the child I works for calls me girl.”

She is heard in awed silence, which ends with a standing ovation. It is a magical moment, one of many in the film.

Later, talk will turn to Burns’ attitude towards women. You have to hand it to Angelou - she is not afraid to challenge accepted wisdom. When someone criticises Burns for causing “a heck of a lot of disruption” and keeping Jean Armour waiting, Angelou’s response is priceless. The evening ends with, what else, Auld Lang Syne.

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Some 30 years old now, Taylors’ film is slightly showing its age and could do with captions to introduce each speaker (they were not on the version I saw). But it’s a wonderful piece for a’ that.

Benedict Cumberbatch (The Power of the Dog, Brexit: the Uncivil War) and Abi Morgan (Shame, Suffragette) are the lead and writer respectively on a new six-part drama, Eric (Netflix, from Thursday).

Cumberbatch plays Vincent, whose nine-year-old son Edgar vanishes on his way to school. Vincent blames himself and as the search continues he increasingly retreats into his world of puppets, and one in particular - Eric, a blue monster created by Edgar.

Eric calls for Cumberbatch to be put through the wringer in a way not seen since Patrick Melrose. Set in 1980s New York, there is plenty of political issues for Morgan to grapple with, from the Aids epidemic to a city brought low by soaring crime rates.

Few bands in pop history have a sound as immediately recognisable as the Beach Boys. As one contributor to the lavish documentary The Beach Boys (Disney+, available now) says, it did not matter where you were in the world, anyone with a sunny California dream could buy into this harmonising combo. They were as world-conquering as their great rivals, four lads from Liverpool you may have heard of, and arguably more pioneering.

Directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny and written by Mark Monroe, the film takes the group back to their beginnings. The band was always a family and friends affair, with the three Wilson brothers, Brian, Carl and Dennis, joined by Al Jardine, a pal, and Mike Love, a cousin, in the original line-up. The names would change down the years but the guiding force would always be the same - Brian Wilson.

The film features never-before-seen footage and new interviews with Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, David Marks, and Bruce Johnston, plus other leading lights in the music business, including Janelle Monáe and Don Was.

The story of the Beach Boys was also the story of America at a certain point in its history - carefree, confident, a place where young people threw themselves into having a good time. The culture would be transformed, as would the Beach Boys, but it took a while for the band to catch up.

Pet Sounds was the comeback of all pop comebacks. But if the old Beach Boys were lagging behind the times, this new sound, created by Brian Wilson, was too far ahead of popular tastes. Sergeant Pepper was more of a commercial success. That would change, and Brian Wilson would be recognised as the pop genius he was all along.

Between them, the Beach Boys have sold more than 100 million records worldwide. This film should sell a few more. Unmissable.