For full TV listings for the week, see thetimes.co.uk/tvplanner
Viewing guide, by James Jackson
Vienna Blood: The Melancholy Countess
BBC2, 9pm
There’s nothing wrong with old-fashioned drama when it’s done with care and attention, and Vienna Blood is proof. Back after a quietly successful debut in 2019 — when it flew under the radar — tonight starts a trilogy of episodes with the story of the White Countess. Once again the drama catches your attention with its elegant recreation of high society in 1907 Vienna, then draws you in further through the whodunnit aspect, there to be cracked by the show’s double act, psychiatrist Dr Max Liebermann (Matthew Beard) and bowler-hatted detective Oskar Rheinhardt (Jürgen Maurer). Yes, this is a bit Holmes and Watson in some regards, but more Austrian in feel and more psychoanalytical in method; in other words, Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud. This time the fresh-faced Liebermann — Beard can look a touch milquetoast, yet he works — has the added complication of labouring under a disgraced reputation. One of his patients, a depressed Hungarian countess, appears to have committed suicide in the bath of her hotel suite. Liebermann’s newfangled therapeutic methods are being blamed so he has to clear his name by solving the riddle of the countess’s death with the help of his gruff counterpart, Rheinhardt. Along the way Liebermann has to recall the melancholic dreams of his late patient, allowing for some atmospheric sequences. As crime dramas go, this is a world away from voguish social realism (such as Mare of Easttown); instead, this doesn’t feel the need to be fashionable, and that turns out to be its strongest suit.
Gardeners’ World Winter Specials
BBC2, 8pm
How can you look after your garden and its wildlife over the winter months? Gardeners’ World is here to help. There is advice on planting trees and shrubs that provide shelter and food in the form of berries including hawthorn, ivy, rose hips and holly, and the plants favoured by pollinators including mahonia, daphne and clematis. Nick Bailey extols the virtues of evergreens for when the days are short, while Adam Frost finds a wonderful world of planting — designed for the colder months — when he visits Cambridge University Botanic Garden. If all this doesn’t inspire you to get outdoors, nothing will.
Grayson’s Art Club: An Exhibition for Britain
Channel 4, 8pm
In the gloomiest periods of lockdown Grayson Perry’s Art Club was a tonic simply for encouraging people to exercise their (perhaps dormant) artistic instincts. The public sent in their efforts (17,000 of them) based on various themes, and now we have a culmination of sorts as Perry takes viewers behind the scenes at his new Art Club exhibition at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. This will house the very best of this public art and form a lasting artistic record of the experiences of the nation this year. The exhibition is already open to the public.
Gavin & Stacey Christmas Special
BBC1, 8.25pm
Given the astonishing success of this revival from 2019, we’ll surely one day have another Gavin & Stacey Christmas special, but not this year. In the meantime, here’s a repeat of that eventful yuletide knees-up with the families from Essex and Barry Island united by lovebirds Gavin (Mathew Horne) and Stacey (Joanna Page). Apart from Rob Brydon singing Fairytale of New York, it also features the show’s writers, James Corden and Ruth Jones, reprising their roles as wideboy Smithy and the deadpan Nessa, whose child together is proving to be a chip off both blocks.
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Nick Cave: Idiot Prayer
BBC4, 9pm
Forget the usual Friday night rock docs, this musical experience is something else altogether. Just Nick Cave alone at a grand piano in Alexandra Palace for 90 minutes singing songs full of soul-baring regret, or perhaps catharsis, given the tragedy that Cave has endured in recent years. The lighting is understated yet beautiful, and the performance of Cave, dressed in a dark Gucci suit, is the antithesis of Adele’s recent showbiz special. This is a true artistic statement. For something so stark, it is riveting.
Catch-up TV, by Ben Dowell
Only Murders in the Building
Disney+
The ten episodes of this intriguing light drama about a trio of podcast obsessives investigating the death — is it suicide or murder? — of a man in their New York apartment building are eminently bingeable. One of its many joys is the generational mismatch, with Steve Martin (who co-created this) teaming up with his fellow comedy veteran Martin Short and the millennial superstar singer Selena Gomez. Martin is Charles-Haden Savage, a washed-up actor who once enjoyed fame in a terrible 1980s cop show, Short’s Oliver is a Broadway director also struggling for work and money whose flash apartment is, he says, all he has. Gomez’s Mabel is perhaps an even bigger mystery who, we quickly learn, had a much closer relationship to the dead man than she tells her new friends.
Film choice
Kick-Ass (15, 2010)
BBC1, 12.10am
Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Dave, aka masked vigilante Kick-Ass, and Chloë Grace Moretz plays Mindy, aka schoolgirl bad-ass Hit-Girl, in this amateur-superhero movie. Dave is a comic book nerd in a flashy customised wetsuit with little other than higher-than-average pain tolerance to qualify him as a superhero. Yet he has the will and, in the indomitable Hit-Girl, a formidable wing woman. Hit-Girl and her father, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), are a crime fighting duo with skills that are rather more honed than Dave’s have-a-go technique. All three meet their match when the son of a local crime boss (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) dons his cape and mask to become Red Mist, the evil arch-nemesis of our ad hoc heroes. It’s boisterous fun, but really violent. (117min) Wendy Ide
Shot Caller (15, 2017)
Film4, 12.55am
Fans of Breaking Bad and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet will find resonances in this prison drama about a clean-living, kind-hearted stockbroker called Jacob (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who drinks too much at dinner one night, accidentally kills his best friend in a car crash on the way home and is put in the slammer. There, Jacob, obviously, becomes a fighter, stabber, hider of drugs and, ultimately, murderous neo-Nazi (it’s a journey from white collar to white supremacist). Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones) never convinces as anything other than a handsome guy underneath a hefty moustache, while the movie recalls Tom Selleck’s schlocky 1989 prison drama An Innocent Man. (120min) Kevin Maher
Radio choice, by Joe Clay
CrowdScience
BBC World Service 8.30pm
According to a recent poll from the American Psychiatric Association, the pandemic has left many of us struggling to make the most basic decisions, from what to wear in the morning to what to eat at night. We are experiencing “decision fatigue” and the CrowdScience listener David wants advice about the best way to approach decision-making. Is it about understanding our psychology? Being more accurate? Better at predicting the consequences of our actions? Or being fairer? Caroline Steel and Anand Jagatia speak to experts in psychology, technology and ethics in an attempt to find out.