Sunday

Line Of Duty

9pm, BBC One

Anyone who has ever seen Line Of Duty (or any movie or cop show of the last 50 years) could not have been all that surprised by the big twist shock revelation at the end of last week’s instalment: this year’s lead baddie is not – as the team suspected at length for absolutely no reason – the woman played by an actor we only vaguely recognise, but is actually the character played by the biggest guest star, Stephen Graham. Who saw that coming? Now that the AC-12 detectives have caught up with the rest of us, they can begin to investigate the guy, deep undercover cop John Corbett, who has gone rogue and turned into a genuine criminal gang leader…OR HAS HE? Meanwhile, Kate and Steve ponder whether their boss, big Ted Hastings, could really be the enigmatic super-corrupt villain, “H.”

Monday

The Victim

9pm, BBC One

The Widow

9pm, STV

The awkward concept of stripping a drama over consecutive nights seems a hangover from the big broadcasters’ early confusion about how to deal with online networks and the rise of binge watching – a befuddled attempt at aping the convenience of streaming by presenting a show in the most inconvenient way possible. It’s a good week for fans of the strategy, though, as the BBC and ITV unleash two dramas going out head-to-head Monday to Thursday. The BBC were unable to provide me with preview material for The Victim, so, other than saying it stars the infallible Kelly Macdonald, can’t say much about it. Meanwhile, in ITV’s mystery The Widow (by serial-writers Harry and Jack Williams, of Missing and Baptiste), Kate Beckinsale plays Georgia, whose husband died nine years ago in a plane crash in the Democratic Republic of Congo…OR DID HE?

Tuesday

Don't Forget The Driver

10pm, BBC Two

Watching the pictures of Britain that go rolling by in Don’t Forget The Driver, the word that floats to mind is “melancholy.” But that’s not quite right. The series is largely set in Bognor Regis, and the camera lingers over all that faded seaside town stuff: a woman buzzing by on a mobility scooter drags her dog along a deserted beachfront path past a lonely blue bench, a closed-up cockle shack, and a bright, forsaken little toytown train ride.

But the mood of such places was truly melancholy maybe thirty or forty years ago, when you could still almost hear the last ghostly echoes of the great British holidaymakers who thronged the jolly piers decades before. Now we’re past that, beyond melancholy, and into something emptier.

The show’s look seems modelled on the photography of Martin Parr, with an unblinking eye for the curiousness of the everyday, the drab surrealism of reality. As the camera stares blankly at them, these vacant piers, cockle stalls and deserted funfair rides seem strange and meaningless. Enigmatic relics of something forgotten, left standing by the sea like Blighty’s version of the Statue Of Liberty at the end of Planet Of The Apes. And left gazing on in bewilderment, instead of Charlton Heston, we have only Toby Jones: an actor destined never to play the epic action roles, yet all the more heroic because of that.

Here, doing more with a slump of his shoulders than many actors could with the entire works of Shakespeare, Jones plays Peter Green, a coach driver who spends his life ferrying busloads of people around on daytrips. If it’s Monday, it must be across the water to Dunkirk, for a quick visit to the war graves, before a more meaningful stop to stock up on booze and fags. If it’s Tuesday, it’s the donkey sanctuary along the motorway.

Between trips, Peter worries about his packed lunch, his aimless daughter, and his mother’s rapid slide into dementia. But he has time for other things, too. The first morning we meet him, for example, he goes to the beach and finds a body washed up on the shore.

In another TV show, this might have been the start of some thrilling adventure. But for Peter it’s just a piercing moment of numb horror. He stares at the thing and then just…runs away, leaving it for someone else to find.

Along with a sense of depression and regret, along with Alzheimer’s and corpses, Don’t Forget The Driver offers us refugees and illegal immigration, people-trafficking, modern slavery and abuse. It’s worth stating that it’s a comedy – one of the most interesting we’ve had for a while.

The gags are a little obvious and awkward at first, but the series quickly finds its mood, throwing out odd, unexpected moments like episode one’s startling little “booze and fags” scene, or its really beautiful closing sequence, as a sky lantern floats away into the night, bobbing to the strains of lulling 1960s pop from Ethiopia.

Jones co-wrote the series with playwright Tim Crouch (a Bognor boy), and the pair have had to fend off accusations that their carefully-detailed show, in which cheap St George’s Cross flags flutter prominently, is “about Brexit.”

It’s not. But it is the first TV series to capture the crazed, confused, depleted mood in our noisy, weary air right now. The location doesn’t seem idly chosen. Declining Bognor sits staring off toward Europe, telling itself that from these kingly beaches D-Day was once launched. Without giving away any spoilers, Peter will find the outside world reaching across the water to touch him, and remind him he’s part of it.

Wednesday

How to See a Black Hole: The Universe's Greatest Mystery

9pm, BBC Four

Last week, word began to spread that scientists were planning a number of mysterious press conferences for today, April 10, to make a major announcement regarding the Event Horizon Telescope. For over a decade, the telescope has been scanning the centre of our galaxy, attempting to take a photograph of a black hole – something that has never been done. Despite the way these theoretical entities have become so familiar in the popular imagination, no one has ever seen a black hole: by their very nature, they’re impossible to see, since they swallow light. But this project has been concentrating on trying to capture an image from the edge of the abyss, at the very point light cannot escape. Tonight’s film covers the decade-long mission, and its results. No preview was available, so I can’t confirm that alien spacecraft are involved.

Thursday

Black Summer

Netflix

Trends tend to come and go quicker than ever these days, and yet it’s seriously beginning to look like the craze for zombies is just never going to end. If there’s one thing that might kill it off, it could be the arrival in cinemas this summer of Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, an encouragingly laconic and ridiculous-looking movie with the kind of stupidly star-studded cast last seen in the dying years of the Hollywood disaster wave. Before that, though, zombie heads will be keen to suck the brains from this new series, spun-off from the popular gorefest Z Nation. A prequel, this is a grimmer adventure set several years earlier, during the first and deadliest days of the rising undead apocalypse. Jaime King stars as Rose who, when she’s separated from her daughter in the chaos, sets out on a mission to find her.

Friday

Rock Island Line: The Song That Made Britain Rock

9pm, BBC Four

Declaring that a song is “one of the most important in the history of British pop music,” is usually to invite an argument. But Rock Island Line – specifically, the propulsive version performed by Lonnie Donegan in the rock’n’roll pre-dawn of 1955 – stakes that claim with ease as the track that ignited the skiffle explosion which first inspired the youngsters who would become the Beatles, the Who, the Stones and Bowie to buy guitars (and checked shirts), and begin exploring the byways of American music. Billy Bragg is an ideal presenter for this excellent film, tracing the song’s roots, its evolution through performance by inmates of the US prison system, and the influence of its first great interpreter, Lead Belly. Speaking with veterans of “Britain’s first alternative music scene,” Bragg also explores the atmosphere around the skiffle movement, all coffee houses and civil rights.

Saturday

Big Gold Dream,

9pm, BBC Scotland

Saturday night is when TV stations have a nice rest from trying to come up with anything anyone might want to watch – like most other nights, only more blatantly. On the plus side, this means they sometimes put on an interesting repeat by accident, and so it is tonight, with another showing of director Grant McPhee’s valuable documentary on Scotland’s strange, fecund and febrile post-punk DIY music scene(s). The big bang was The Clash’s 1977 performance at Edinburgh Playhouse – more particularly, the awkward mob angles of support group Subway Sect, which sowed seeds for the Glasgow waves spearheaded by Postcard Records and Orange Juice, and the Edinburgh contingents led by Fast Product and Fire Engines. Fast’s Bob Last is among contributors almost managing to cram a thousand odd stories into a coherent narrative. Magic stuff.