Martin Compston leaves Scotland for delights of Norway

He’s too modest, but then the star of Line of Duty, Mayflies, and Sweet Sixteen is skilled in seeming like a guy who just got lucky in life. What’s that line about the harder someone works the luckier they get? That’s Compston.

With his pal Phil MacHugh as co-presenter, the pair bantered their way around Scotland and now they are back to do the same in Norway. Think Mortimer & Whitehouse, minus a few years and without the aches and pains. Plus the car karaoke, mustn’t forget that.

Their first stop is Oslo and the Holmenkollen ski arena to try roller-skiing followed by ziplining the ski jump. Then it’s on to The Storting, Norway’s parliament, to meet the country’s youngest MP, Maren Grøthe.

The travellers end the day kipping in a hut, which doesn’t sound that nice but wait till you see it. A but and ben it is not.

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The Bafta Film Awards (BBC1, Sunday, 7pm) have another change of host this year after try-outs with Joanna Lumley, Alison Hammond, Richard E Grant, and others. David Tennant’s the name, you may have heard of him. Tall chap, Scottish, never backward in coming forward? The very same.

Oppenheimer tops the table with 13 nominations, with Poor Things, an adaption of Alisdair Gray’s novel directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, is not far behind with 11. While the film is not set in Glasgow, the book is, so we’re claiming this as our own. Mon the Poor Things.

The musical treats of the evening include a performance by Hannah Waddingham (Ted Lasso), while Sophie Ellis-Bextor sings Murder on the Dancefloor, her disco classic brought to life again by the film Saltburn.

Actor, writer and director Samantha Morton is to receive a Bafta fellowship for work spanning from Morvern Callar to Minority Report.

Among those charged with presenting the Bafta masks to the winners are Cate Blanchett, Chiwetel Ejiofor, David Beckham, Hugh Grant and Idris Elba.

If you recall 2022’s Falklands War: A Frontline Story you will need no persuading to watch Miners’ Strike: a Frontline Story (BBC2, Sunday, 9pm).

In their own words, a cross-section of people who lived through what the film rightly calls “the most divisive conflict of a generation), tell it like it was, and is.

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It takes a special film to cast new light on what was one of the longest and most widely covered strikes in modern British history. This 90-minute film manages to do so, not by deploying any clever-clever approach or having a startling revelation at its heart. What we have here are simple, straight-to-camera interviews backed up with footage from the time. But what interviews, though, and what footage.

Among the 15 men and women who share their experiences are strikers and working miners, women who ran the soup kitchens and kept homes together, and police officers. One of the latter, shipped in from Thames Valley, recalls the double time bonanza that paid for many a new car, fridge and microwave. They jokingly dubbed them “Scargill’s washing machine” and “the car that Scargill bought”, after the NUM leader.

There is humour here, albeit most of it bleak, but there is also humanity and dignity. No attempt is made to disguise the ugliness of the violence, seen most memorably in footage from Orgreave, where 6000 police took on 8000 miners. I remember the footage being shocking at the time but as we see here, that barely touched what went on.

The media of the time do not emerge well from the strike, nor do the forces of law and order or the politicians, Mrs Thatcher to the fore. Indeed, the film opens with one former miner complaining that the story has never been told accurately and in full. I hope he feels this film, at least, goes some way to redress the balance.

The series finale of Criminal Record (Apple TV+) lands next Wednesday, and what a loss it will be. Paul Rutman’s story of past police corruption and its continuing impact today has gripped from the off, with the relationship between DCI Daniel Hegarty and DS June Lenker (Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo) proving endlessly fascinating.

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Great to see Cathy Tyson back too, playing the mother of a man wrongly convicted of murder.

Hegarty is a character and a half in his own right. Despite the evidence that he is one mean hombre, there is something that makes you wonder if he could yet be redeemable. DS Lenker, courageous, principled and often torn in her feelings about the job, is another character who could have carried an entire series on her own. The scenes with her mother (Zoe Wanamaker) and partner (Stephen Campbell Moore) hint at so much more to be told, so everything crossed for a new series.