For full TV listings for the week, see thetimes.co.uk/tvplanner
Viewing guide, by James Jackson
Dalgliesh
Channel 5, 9pm
For all that the idea of another revival of PD James’s detective feels a touch unimaginative as TV dramas go, there is something pleasingly direct and uncomplicated about Channel 5’s Dalgliesh (three stories told over six episodes). Stepping in the footsteps of Roy Marsden and Martin Shaw, Bertie Carvel takes up the mantle of the calm, patient and very shrewd Scotland Yard investigator. And he plays him straight — refreshingly free of eccentricities or gimmicks. He even keeps his troubled side dialled down, although he’s recently lost his wife, which means he can seem a touch brooding. Oh, and he’s a poet on the side. “Policeman and a poet — that’s an odd combination,” one interviewee observes. “It has its uses,” Dalgliesh replies furtively. However, before all of this there is the crime, and it is one you’re unlikely to forget in a hurry. As those who have read James’s 1971 novel Shroud for a Nightingale might recall, a student nurse at Nightingale House is poisoned during a routine training procedure. This we see in the opening scenes in which the worried nurse in question has a gastrostomy tube fed into her stomach as she lies awake and with the other students watching on . . . before grisly pandemonium erupts. Consider this your warning not to watch while eating your dinner. Dalgliesh arrives in a gleaming E-type Jaguar (this is set in the early 1970s) and, in his considered and watchful way, starts to get the lie of the land. The students’ house is riven with petty jealousies, guilty secrets and, indeed, blackmail. We can surely trust in Dalgliesh to fathom it out.
Harbor from the Holocaust
PBS America, 7.30pm
It is estimated that six million Jews died in the Holocaust. This documentary is not about that horror, but rather how 20,000 Jewish refugees fled Nazi-occupied Europe to Shanghai. The people of Shanghai were gracious to their newcomers, and one district has since been called a modern-day Noah’s Ark for Jews. What the refugees couldn’t foresee was that Shanghai would itself fall into the hands of the Nazis’ ally, Japan. Extraordinary recollections and readings from diaries illuminate a lesser-told story of the Second World War, one of hope.
Sort Your Life Out
BBC1, 8pm
A BBC version of a Netflix Marie Kondo show; here it’s Stacey Solomon, the presenter who is also a “tidying extraordinaire”, as the voiceover puts it, going around to people’s houses in a generic bit of early evening lifestyle fluff. A crack team of organising fanatics help one family each week to declutter, reorganise and “work their magic” on the stuff in their house. It’s full of the usual tips about a universal domestic headache, and not without the odd perceptive observation, such as how having too much storage can be its own problem: you just fill the extra space with more stuff.
Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes
Sky Documentaries/Now, 9pm
Ronan Farrow has made a career from outing #MeToo monsters, and his investigations into Harvey Weinstein have won him a Pulitzer prize. This new series is a TV version of his revealing interviews with whistleblowers and other sources conducted for his podcast and book. The first episode features Farrow’s in-depth interview with Ambra Gutierrez, an Italian model who took part in a sting operation to capture an admission from Weinstein. Hearing recordings of the film mogul’s attempt at enforced seduction (she was wearing a wire) is chilling.
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The Act
5Star, 10pm
Previously shown on the on-demand service Starzplay, this eight-part true-crime drama follows the twisted relationship between the Emmy award-winning Patricia Arquette’s diabolical, overprotective mom, Dee Dee, and her sweet, wheelchair-using daughter Gypsy (Joey King). Gypsy is 15 and has lived her life in a bubble of medical ailments and disabilities as dictated by Dee Dee, but is there actually anything wrong with Gypsy? And how will this play out as Gypsy starts to desire independence? Their new neighbours smell a rat in this disturbing, queasily watchable view of dysfunctional parenthood.
Catch-up TV, by Joe Clay
Public Enemies
Britbox
Tony Marchant’s 2012 BBC drama examines the balance between crime and punishment. When a prisoner commits a murder while on parole, it is followed by a frenzy of furious headlines and national soul-searching. The parole officer responsible (Anna Friel) is suspended. When she returns to work she is given the supervision of a young man (Daniel Mays) who, ten years earlier, murdered his girlfriend. All he asks is that she doesn’t think the worst of him. She wants to help him even though her good intentions in the past had been her undoing. While he is struggling to stay out of prison, she is struggling to safeguard her position without selling him down the river. Both of them are being watched.
Film choice, by Chris Bennion
The Furies (PG, 1950)
Film4, 2.20pm
There aren’t too many westerns like this one, blending film noir, gothic melodrama and the Wild West. Walter Huston, in his final film, plays the ruthless, vainglorious cattle baron TC Jeffords, who alienates his loving daughter, Vance (Barbara Stanwyck), when he pays off the man she loves, Rip Darrow. When TC introduces another woman into his life, the haughty Flo Burnett, Vance goes to war against her father. Luckily for her, the unpleasant TC has made plenty of enemies over the years, forcing droves of people off his property — the richly and appropriately named Furies. It is a Greek tragedy with stirrups, Smith & Wesson and cattle. (109min)
Jackie (15, 2016)
Film4, 9pm
Rarely have the words Le roi est mort, vive le roi been more vividly illustrated than in Jackie, when the former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, fresh from burying her assassinated husband, comes across the new president Lyndon B Johnson and his wife in the White House. Regime change was ever this brutal and the sudden loss of power is shocking. Pablo Larrain’s fascinating film covers the week after JFK’s death in detail from his widow’s point of view, and shows how Jackie (Natalie Portman) sealed her husband’s legacy as a significant politician after less than three years in office. The film is as colour-saturated as the news footage of the time, with Larrain merging the real with the fictional. (97min) Kate Muir
Radio choice, by Ben Dowell
Footlight Fairies
Radio 4 Extra, 2.30pm
Long before Gillian Wearing’s bronze casting of Millicent Fawcett holding a banner reading “courage calls to courage everywhere” became, in 2018, the first statue of a woman erected in Parliament Square, the theatre critic Susannah Clapp explored the story of the 19th-century reformer. This fascinating programme from 2004 tells the story of the woman who campaigned to remove children from the 19th-century stage and investigates the Victorian obsession with the juveniles, who played everything from fairies to Lewis Carroll’s oyster ghosts. With dramatisations written by Philip Glassborow and based on research by Anne Varty. Siobhan Redmond plays Fawcett.