Sunday

Storyville: Decadence and Downfall: The Shah Of Iran’s Ultimate Party 9pm, BBC Four Director Hassan Amini’s family left Iran following the 1979 revolution, and his documentary looks back on the lost country that was – and to some of the circumstances that led to Ayatollah Khomeini taking power. The focus is the infamous “Party At Persepolis” of 1971, thrown by the Shah to mark 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, and to celebrate himself in the process. Money was no object. Seventy kings, queens and presidents were invited to the five-day event, for which a lavish city of silk tents was erected at the ancient desert capital. The staff of Maxim’s in Paris was flown in to serve a lavish banquet and pour the world’s rarest wines, while guests were entertained by a vast pageant…Meanwhile, out in the police state, anger at the self-indulgence grew, and Islamic revolution stirred. As a tale of monumental arrogance and the fall that came after, it almost has the feel of an Old Testament parable, but the repercussions remain very much with us today.

Monday

American Crime Story: The People V OJ Simpson 9pm, BBC One Vinyl 9pm, Sky Atlantic

Two huge American period pieces land simultaneously tonight. One is made by people known for turning out gleeful pop pulp; the other the brainchild of two figures who deserve to be counted among the most significant artists of the second half of the 20th century. Guess which one is a big fat mess of awful nothing.

First, the good news. A dramatisation of “The Trial Of The Century,” The People V OJ Simpson is the latest manifestation of the craze for “classy” True Crime that began with the cult documentary podcast Serial and has continued in TV iterations like The Jinx and Making A Murderer. These series all add the sheen of tastefulness and consideration to the genre, but what’s most striking, and compelling, about The People V OJ Simpson is that it’s not ashamed to bring out the trash.

The 10-part drama is the first outing under the American Crime Story banner by the team behind American Horror Story, Glee and Scream Queens. It shares a certain slickly tacky aspect with those, but, based on New Yorker journalist Jeffrey Toobin’s bestselling account of the Simpson case, The Run Of His Life, it’s in a different class, blending shiny-shabby scandal with an underlying seriousness.

On top, with John Travolta playing Robert Shapiro, the head of OJ’s legal team (sly, unctuous, prissy and bizarre, it’s Travolta’s best performance in decades), there’s the air of flaky pantomime. Underneath, there’s a tough retrospective probing. This thing was a grotesque pantomime after all; but it was a carnival that pitched its tent right on the fault lines of race – the series begins by framing Simpson’s 1994-95 trial in the context of the 1991 Rodney King beating and riots – that are fracturing ever wider in the US today.

The writers also delight in teasing out other aftershocks that are still with us. Led by Cuba Gooding Jr’s charming and volatile OJ, the exceptional cast includes Sarah Paulson and Courtney B Vance, squaring off as Marcia Clark and Johnnie Cochrane, the prosecuting DA and defending attorney. But the performance that stands out in the opening episode is David Schwimmer’s doleful turn as OJ’s most devoted friend, gazing on bewildered through soulful, puppy-dog eyes, never doubting The Juice for a second. His name was Robert Kardashian. And…yes, it is.

Where American Crime Story shines a sharp light on the 1990s then turns it back on us, Vinyl mostly confirms that producers Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese had a damned good time in the 1970s. Because they barely remember what happened.

To an embarrassing degree, the series wants to be Mad Men set in New York’s early-1970s music scene. But, where Mad Men knew its advertising world in forensic detail then shot off in all directions, Vinyl stumbles between stating the obvious and getting it wrong, and goes no further. For long stretches, I couldn’t tell if it was a parody: then came a scene warning that heroin was Bad, and I realised they were probably serious.

Bobby Cannavale does what he can with the Don Draper-substitute, crisis-struck record label boss Richie Finestra. There’s the odd spark of something in his back story, but it’s drowned in anachronism and pointlessness. To keep it moving, Scorsese, who directed the two-hour-but-feels-longer pilot, resorts to replaying “Scorsese” hits, remakes of scenes culled from his back catalogue, mostly Goodfellas. The result is simultaneously overdone, half-baked and cloth-eared.

Tuesday

Alan Partridge’s Mid-Morning Matters

9pm, Sky Atlantic

He is returned. He is returned. Do you hear? He is returned! Sky sent reviewers all six episodes of the latest chapter of the Alaniad at once – I think they were trying to kill us off. I had to stop my initial binge at two, because I’d started laughing up blood during a section involving the new radio drama Alan has written. As with the original 2011 online episodes, the cabin-fever set up is that we are looking on via the studio webcam as the great man broadcasts his daily show from the cutting edge of British radio, North Norfolk Digital, discussing the hot topics and large questions of the day, while doing an unexpected amount of Jimmy Savile impressions. Sidekick Simon (Tim Key), whose girlfriend is a vegetarian, is by his side once more, and Partridge addicts will be particularly pleased to note the series building on the events of the Alpha Papa movie, with some other familiar faces glimpsed as we go. Gemlike in its brilliance, as it always, always is.

Wednesday

One Child

9pm, BBC Two

This well-meaning series, about a young, UK-raised Chinese woman suddenly forced into examining her identity and the differences between her adopted and ancestral cultures, is the kind of message drama where the message has been deemed of greater importance than the drama. But, schematic as it is, it’s still a touching way of exploring the issues. Katie Leung stars as Mei, who, as a consequence of China’s one-child policy, was adopted as a baby and raised in Britain. Unexpectedly, she gets a message from China that her birth mother wants to meet her, and is desperate for help: the brother she has never met is on death row, accused of a murder he didn’t commit. And so she begins her journey: but is she going home, or leaving it? It’s being paired tonight with The Great Chinese Crash? (10pm), a documentary by Robert Peston exploring China’s recent and dramatic economic slowdown, the effect it’s having there, as a landscape of ghostowns and derelict factories springs up in the north, and its potential impact on Britain.

Thursday

Hardwire: Agent Down

9pm, Sky Atlantic

Continuing Sky Atlantic’s series of films exploring the drug trade in the US and Mexico, this documentary probes the murky case of former Special Agent Victor Avila. Five years ago, Avila, then working for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was ambushed on Mexico’s perilous Highway 57 by a heavily armed gang from the notorious Los Zetas drugs cartel. He and his partner Jaime Zapata were on a covert mission to retrieve surveillance equipment; Zapata was killed in the shooting, and Avila suffered life-threatening injuries. Following the incident, Avila began questioning why the pair of them had been sent down that there that day, when Highway 57 was known to be very high-risk – the Los Zetas ran the region, and controlled the road. In an exclusive interview, he says that deeper he dug, the more convinced he became that his government was deliberately withholding the truth about what happened, as part of a cover-up that, he alleges, reaches right up to the White House.

Friday

Daft Punk Unchained

10pm, BBC Four

Daft Punk fanatics might not come way from this documentary having learned anything they didn’t already know about the French electronic music duo – while it has their blessing, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the men behind the robot masks, don’t take part. But it’s a satisfying account of their long career nonetheless, even if the contributions from collaborators (including Nile Rodgers, Giorgio Moroder, Paul Williams, Pharrell Williams and Michel Gondry) gets a little too backslapping. As far as “new” stuff, one of the biggest coups is some of the oldest material: fuzzy live footage of Darlin’, the duo’s first band, caught performing some drone-psych in the early 1990s, looking about 12. From here, it’s a story of refusal to compromise, doing it their own way, masks (more great archive shows some of the best disguises they’ve worn), and world domination, peppered with performance footage. There’s more robot action afterward, with a repeat of Kraftwerk: Pop Art (11pm), a sadly underwhelming documentary on the great originators.

Saturday

Trapped

9pm, BBC Four

By the time last week’s double-bill of this engrossing Icelandic thriller ended, it was getting like a nightmarish fairy tale: the little kids lost out in the night while the blizzards raged, with monsters loose in the dark. Meanwhile, the small town’s local police, led by chief Andri (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), had done a good job of demonstrating that they aren’t up to the job of catching the killer: not only had they let their only suspect escape, they’d managed to lose the victim’s body, too. As we return, photos of that missing corpse are beginning to be shared online, and Andri is still butting heads with the deeply antagonistic ferry captain. With the killer still at large, an atmosphere of fear and suspicion is growing in the little town, which remains utterly cut off from the outside world by the snowstorms and icepacks. All they need now, of course, is the threat of a massive avalanche coming down on them…