And that’s a wrap: last night concluded 10 years of The Great British Bake Off. This show is the nation’s TV equivalent of comfort food. In the past, it has stuck to a well-worn recipe — the result was fun to fight over but easy to love.
“He was dying slowly. We just made it quick.” This is sharp-faced, menacing Max (Mark Bonnar: Catastrophe, Unforgotten, Line of Duty) to his sensitive brother Jake (Jamie Sives: Chernobyl, Game of Thrones, The James Plays). Jake is driving Max’s car on their way back from a wedding in Fife – Max is beside him, swigging champagne - and accidentally runs into and kills an old man in an Edinburgh suburb. Well, the old guy did have terminal pancreatic cancer, so that makes it OK, doesn’t it?
This series examines murders in the USA “with elements of love and passion as well as prejudice”, and the second season opened (on BBC One) with "Killing in the Classroom", the story of the fatal stabbing of New York school student Matthew McCree by bisexual teenager Abel Cedeno.
“I think we all dream of simplifying our lives and reconnecting with nature,” reckons Ben Fogle, and since this was the start of the tenth series of this show, he must have struck a chord with viewers. His first subject was 24-year-old Italian woman Annalisa Vitale, who’d dropped out of university in Italy despite her obvious academic potential and set out to build a life of self-reliance. “People say I wasted my brain, but I think I saved my brain,” she reflected.
Pose offers something that is really rare in the TV world: it’s a show that manages to be both darkly sombre and completely uplifting. The drama, which is about New York City’s 1980s ball culture, focuses on the lives of trans women and gay men competing for glory in the ballroom while fighting for their lives on the streets.
I wouldn’t want to live in Jack Thorne’s head. Nor Sarah Lancashire’s, for that matter. The Accident is Thorne’s latest four-part drama, and the final instalment in his grim and gripping trilogy of shows for Channel 4.
This terrifying but gripping BBC Four series about Northern Ireland’s savage sectarian war reached its conclusion with a meticulously detailed account of how hostilities were eventually brought to a close by the Good Friday Agreement, which came into effect in December 1999.
What’s the most ridiculous programme that Channel 4 has ever made? Sex Box? The Execution of Gary Glitter? Extreme Celebrity Detox? Whatever, The British Tribe Next Door is up there vying for supremacy.
And welcome back to our favourite French cop show – perhaps our favourite cop show from anywhere, in fact – which has raced into its seventh series (on BBC Four) with some typically grimy storylines about death and lowlife in a very de-romanticised Paris. If you catch a glimpse of landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, it’s only in the far distance across drab expanses of rain-soaked rooftops.
Well here’s an interesting one. We’ve been up to our eyebrows in Eurocops for the past few years, but this Anglo-Japanese fusion from BBC Two (the title translates as "Duty / Shame") feels strikingly fresh and different.