TV: Damien Love reveals his pick of the week's TV

Shoah

7pm, BBC Four

This Tuesday, January 27, is Holocaust Memorial Day, and the event has particular resonance this year. It's the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau; it falls as Jewish voices in Europe are speaking of feeling newly afraid on their own streets and while Islamophobia is running high; and it comes as, from Nigeria to Syria to North Korea, humankind is daily demonstrating that our taste for holocaust and death camps remains unabated. The BBC's season to mark the date gathers pace this week: look out tonight for Surviving The Holocaust: Freddie Knoller's War (10pm, BBC Two), in which the splendid 93-year-old recounts his experiences feeling (and flirting with) Nazis across Europe, working with the French resistance and being sent to Auschwitz. On Tuesday itself, there's coverage as hundreds of the remaining survivors gather for the Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony in London (BBC Two, 7pm), followed by Touched By Auschwitz (9pm), a documentary on the experiences of six survivors during and after the war. As acts of remembrance go, however, few have the power of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's astonishing documentary, originally released in 1985. An extraordinary nine-and-a-half hour piece that sits like a monolith of memory, it hears from witnesses (both Nazi and victim), it lingers over what seem at first the smallest details (old train timetables) and, most powerfully, it films the quiet sites where the killings occurred. Yet Lanzmann builds his film without recourse to archive footage; the sense of the past being always present becomes devastating. A great work. BBC Four is showing it in two parts, tonight and next week.

Monday

David Starkey's Magna Carta

9pm, BBC Two

The historian explores the Great Charter of 1215 that has been held up as a roadmap for liberty ever since. Starkey takes to the Thames, the superhighway of 13th-century England, to lay out the troubled origins of the document that was signed on the banks at Runnymede. Originally drawn up to hold King John in line, it almost died at birth, but endured to help cement in our culture the notion that everyone, including the monarch, is subject to the rule of law - an idea that proved especially potent across the Atlantic in the North American colonies, whose citizens eventually took it as a symbol of the rights of the individual against the tyranny of the state, and a foundation for the US constitution. To judge by the sunny weather, Starkey filmed the documentary months ago, but the concluding section, urging that liberties should not be surrendered for the sake of security, seems timely.

Tuesday

Bitter Lake

BBC iPlayer

Grand in scale and ambition, occult, paranoid and moving in tone, the new documentary from Adam Curtis - provocateur behind devious, difficult, slyly funny and woozily brilliant TV essays like The Power Of Nightmares and All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace - debuts this week, but not quite on TV. Instead, Bitter Lake will be lurking on iPlayer from Sunday January 25, waiting for you. At heart, the film is about Afghanistan, and what has happened there over 60 years, taking the country as the bruised prism through which to view the oily, bloody, geopolitical manoeuvring and counter-manoeuvring between the US, Russia, the UK and Saudi Arabia - key dark player in the story that emerges. Being Curtis, though, the film is also about the narratives that are imposed on events by politicians, and how the attempt is breaking down: "Those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality. But those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow..." Curtis himself seems almost to have lost faith in language: for long stretches, his narration disappears, letting images and sound, and the juxtapositions and collisions he creates between images and sound, weave their own spell. Plundering BBC archives, he uses offcuts and rushes, clips that didn't make the news because they were too bloody, too banal, too accidental or too weird. Running two-and-a-half hours, the effect, glimpses of other stories untold or untellable, ruined bodies, soldiers dancing, children staring and playing, is strangely emotional and at times overwhelming.

Wednesday

Wolf Hall

9pm, BBC One

The adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels really begins to come into its own with this second episode. With Cardinal Wolsey banished north, Cromwell (a brilliant Mark Rylance) remains behind in London, a faithful, lonely figure at the whispering court as he seeks in vain to bring his master back into favour with King Henry (Damian Lewis). Meanwhile, when Anne Boleyn requests his presence, Cromwell gets to see close-up how frustrated this queen-in-waiting is becoming. It's wonderful work from Rylance as his watchful, quiet, yet strangely outspoken outsider slips between the plotting and begins to attract the attention of the king. Here and there, we glimpse clues about the mysterious past that has made him the man he is, and will become. There's a particularly fantastic little scene between Cromwell, Thomas More (Anton Lesser) and his rabbit.

Thursday - pick of the week

Fortitude

9pm, Sky Atlantic

"Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Lap - we got 'em all here, and I'll guarantee you'll never know which is which..."

The line is spoken by a character in Sky's new megaproduction Fortitude, but it also feels like a summary of the thinking behind it. Our passion for all things Scandinavian has cooled, but such is the gestation period of making TV that the mongrel results of that romance are still dropping on screen.

Fortitude suggests something born out of a brainstorming boardroom orgy, during which various Nordic elements were diced up, fondued with some other fine European cheeses, and then chucked in a blender with vodka and ice, while someone dimmed the lights and stuck on a CD of death metal bands covering Abba, and everyone waited to see what happened.

All snow, blood and accents (although rarely subtitles), it comes on as Scandi as you please, while not really being set anywhere - Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's Winter Wonderland, with more killings. The Fortitude in question is a strange, isolated Arctic community, surrounded by snow and menaced by polar bears to the extent no one travels without a rifle. Everyone knows each other, many sleep with each other, and most have dark secrets they allude to tantalisingly.

There is a mysterious research facility, where some scientists are investigating the local glacier, while others do horrible things to animals.

Despite all this, the governor hopes to open the place up as a chic tourist resort, built around a showcase ice-hotel she is planning to carve out of the glacier - but rumours of an astonishing scientific find in the ice could hamper her plan; and a sudden, gruesome murder doesn't help at all.

Money has been spent on the series. It looks terrific, and respectable actors have been tempted to slum in it.

Here's Michael Gambon as a dying drunk; here's Christopher Eccleston as a scientist; here's Stanley Tucci, paying tribute to his early screen break as an extra in a 1987 Kojak television movie as the knowing bald outsider cop, flown in to investigate the killing.

And here is Sofie Grabol, The Killing's Sarah, who has had a strict no-knitwear clause written into her contract, and plays the governor in a manner that perfectly captures the quality of Sue Perkins going into a bad mood because she's lost her glasses.

Watching them line up, I was strongly reminded of movies like Airport 1975 and The Poseidon Adventure. Like those disaster films, Fortitude will probably be more fun to watch when it turns up repeated on a bank holiday in 20 years' time.

With the exception of Tucci's quizzical detective, not many of the characters are immediately likeable, by design.

The programme is keen to keep you off-balance and guessing. Maybe too keen. Halfway through the feature-length first episode, there comes a moment involving a body that might not be dead, when it feels as if, instead of an icy crime thriller, Fortitude might suddenly whip around to reveal itself as a zombie apocalypse instead.

It could still happen. Despite the Nordic trappings, the show feels like Agatha Christie trying to rip-off Twin Peaks with a hangover after a heavy night out with John Carpenter's The Thing.

The suspicion remains it will turn out to be less than the sum of these parts.

It's intriguing enough to leave you wanting to find out which way it will go; yet not quite enough to make you actually care much about what's supposed to be happening in it.

Friday

Kraftwerk: Pop Art

10pm, BBC Four

One day, someone will get around to making the Kraftwerk documentary that the world really needs. In the meantime, this hour-long film by Simon Witter is a decent taster. Originally shown on German TV in 2013, it was made to coincide with the group's residency at London's Tate Modern that year, hence the heavy presence of writer Paul Morley among contributing fans and faces. There are sequences of the 2013 incarnation in action at the Tate, but the stuff to salivate over is the archive, laying out the evolution of Ralf Hutter's collective from hairy hippy experimentalists in the Dusseldorf of the late 1960s, to the trancey man-machine we know and love. Along the way come excellent, too-short clips: an embryonic Kraftwerk jamming wild with members of Can on black-and-white German TV circa 1970; Kraftwerk throwing crazy shapes while performing the great Pocket Calculator live in 1981; and a brilliant, hilarious, genuinely surreal spot done up in the full red-shirt robot gear for French TV in 1978. As is the way, the band themselves don't contribute, but there are excerpts from an expressionistically lit Hutter interview from 1981. Showing to complement the concluding episode of Sound Of Song (9pm), it's followed by another repeat for the fine Synth Britannia documentary (11pm).

Saturday

Spiral

9pm, BBC Four

In some respects, the five series of Spiral so far have all been leading up to the two quiet sequences that bookend tonight's double bill; faltering moments shared between Laure (Caroline Proust) and Josephine (Audrey Fleurot), women who once would have happily ripped out each other's throats, now finding themselves drawing instinctively together, for reasons they can't quite articulate. Fleurot has relatively little dialogue this week, but has rarely been so devastating; Proust, as she bumbles headlong into perilous stakeouts with her bump and her uncertain smile, simply grows more scruffily magnificent with each episode. Meanwhile, with pressure mounting from above to hand the case over to another unit, our cops are running out of time and growing desperate to hunt down the thuggish cashpoint raider, Zach. Elsewhere, Judge Roban forges a new alliance, but looks in danger of losing his closest confidante.