HIGHLIGHT OF THE WEEK

Thursday

The Trip To Spain

10pm, Sky Atlantic

Now is a time for heroes, and cometh the hour, cometh the men. As Britain begins leaving Europe, over the horizon charge two dashing buccaneers of a certain age, on a fearless mission to cross the wide seas to Spain, just to remind us what we are opting out of. On the road and looking for adventure, mystery, comradeship, stolen kisses, good food and witty, bickering banter in glorious continental locations. Like a version of The Persauders in which both parts are played by Roger Moore.

It comes as a shock to realise it has been seven years since Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and all the people who live in their heads set off for a drive through the Yorkshire Dales in the miraculous first series of The Trip. Back then, they were just two crazy kids in their mid-forties, with their whole lives ahead of them. Now, however, they have passed 50, and the fact hangs heavy. The term “middle aged” can no longer be avoided or denied. Winter is coming.

And yet, for anyone who has gone along on all the Trips so far – the second, a slow, grand tour of Italy, came in 2014 – the first thing that strikes you this time is that they seem relatively relaxed, even cheerful about it. There is still, thank god, the gentle undercurrent of bitterness, resignation, repression, jealousy, vanity, disappointment, despair and sheer terror. But the pervading air of angst, panic and melancholy that marked the first series has receded somewhat. At least until the sun sets, they are left alone in their hotel rooms, and doubts descend. In the gags they improvise together, part duets, part competitions, Coogan and Brydon have developed a line in jokes that aren’t really jokes, and there comes an early riff insisting that they’re not old, but in their prime. “Ripe,” is the word Coogan settles on, comparing himself to a succulent fruit hanging on a branch. Brydon wonders, what comes next? Get plucked? Or drop?

The flagrantly flimsy excuse for the trip this time is Coogan has made a new series for HBO in which he plays a chef, and they want him and Brydon to do some restaurant reviews in … er …Spain, to promote it. With this mocking salute to motive, they (or the fictional versions of themselves they play) are off, back into the format we all know by heart. They drive around talking. They visit some astonishing-looking restaurants. Brydon tortures Coogan with his inability to do “Small Man Trapped In A Box.” Coogan namedrops, condescends, flirts and worries. They sometimes sing. And they do a lot of impressions. (All the hits are here, including Moore, Michael Caine, Al Pacino, Anthony Hopkins and even, during a spot of Abba, an unexpected, possibly involuntary outbreak of Jimmy Savile.) As ever, it is directed by the mercurial Michael Winterbottom, who continues two traditions that send strangeness thrumming through the series. First, he haunts the journey with literary ghosts, this time, Don Quixote and Laurie Lee’s Spanish memoir, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Second, as the Spanish rain flashes down in torrents, or sunset turns blue, or pale dawn comes up over the mountains, he frames Coogan and Brydon against landscapes so sublime that all their concerns – career, love, parenthood, ageing, life – seem distant, petty and passing. Only the big stuff matters, like who can do the best Mick Jagger, or trying to remember the lyrics to The Windmills Of Your Mind.

Sunday

Line Of Duty

9pm, BBC One

Now, where were we? Last week, the first episode left us dangling on a cliffhanger that was, even by Line Of Duty’s own wacked-out standards, fairly bloody nutty. As the tense, twisty story resumes, it’s safe to state two facts: (1) DCI Roz Huntley has not turned up for work, and nobody can raise her on the phone; (2) a dismembered body has been discovered in the woods … Meanwhile, Kate (Vicky McClure), continues burrowing in her undercover role, looking for clues that Roz’s team might have knowingly mishandled their high-profile murder case. The real big event for fans tonight, however, is the welcome return of the series’ signature interview room scenes, as Supt Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) and Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) settle down at the table with a folder of evidence and seek to turn the screws on a fellow cop. Best of all, the scene also sees the return of the long, excruciating tape-recording warning signal that functions as LOD’s unofficial theme tune.

Monday

Broadchurch

9pm, STV

This final series of Broadchurch has been infinitely better than the woeful second series, but there are still times when it feels content to peddle a kind of easy, picturesque misery – characters having a bad time in soft focus that leave you feeling a bit sad, but don’t actually make you think about anything. There’s a bit of that tonight, with the outbreak of a slight case of The Series Twos designed mainly to give all those lingering old characters hanging aimlessly around the edges of this new story something weepy to do next week. But it’s undeniable that the strength of this series is the unfolding of the central rape case. Hardy and Miller seem to have a new prime suspect in front of them, and the more they look into him, the more the damning evidence piles up. But something still doesn’t feel right, and all those other suspects are continuing to act guilty. Meanwhile, a catastrophic screw up by a member of their team threatens to put the whole case in jeopardy.

Tuesday

How To Be A Surrealist With Philippa Perry

9pm, BBC Four

There was a time when a BBC surrealism season would have lasted a fortnight, but these days we have to make do with a few crumbs crammed into one evening. Still, at least they’ve picked a Tuesday, the most surreal night of the week. The main event is this succinct and amiable introduction to this most vivid, murky, turbulent and infectious of art movements, presented by psychotherapist Philippa Perry (aka, Grayson’s wife), who considers all the most notable artists and tries out some of their techniques. The best moments, though, are interview clips from archive BBC films featuring Max Ernst, René Magritte, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali and Man Ray, which leave you wishing they’d repeat them all. It’s followed by The Secret Surrealist: Desmond Morris (10pm), a lovely little film on the now-89-year-old Naked Ape author’s other career as an artist. Stay tuned for a Un Chien Andalou (10.30pm), Bunuel and Dali’s slicing-up-eyeballs classic of 1928. There was a time they’d have put on a full Bunuel movie season ...

Wednesday

Storyville: Exposed! Magicians, Psychics And Frauds

10pm, BBC Four

A repeat for this fascinating documentary on the work of James Randi, who was 86 when the film was made. Once, known as “The Amazing Randi,” he was one of the world’s great magicians, a David Blaine of his day, who staggered audiences with illusions and death-defying escape stunts from the 1940s to the 1980s. But Randi is perhaps more renowned for his later, tireless work, using his knowledge of magic and chicanery to debunk and expose charlatans and con artists who have used the tricks of his trade to swindle the unsuspecting: religious healers, psychics and fortune tellers have all fallen by his sceptical sword. The film recounts some of his most prominent adventures in this field, including his long rivalry with Uri Geller, who he eventually trounced during a TV clash, and his skewering of American evangelist Peter Popoff, who claimed the voice of God was letting him into the minds of his audience, until Randi revealed it was actually Mrs Popoff, backstage with a radio-transmitter.

Friday

Depeche Mode Night

9pm, BBC Four

In recent decades, the Basildon boys have grown more used to confronting vast stadium crowds, but, two weeks ago, Depeche Mode closed the BBC’s 6 Music Festival by playing to just 2,000 fans crammed up close in Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom – the group’s first return to the blessed east end venue since the fresh-faced synthpopping days of 1984. A slightly edited recording of the show is broadcast tonight at 10pm; of course, for fans who missed out, it can’t replicate being there, but it gives some flavour. Before that, Depeche Mode At The BBC (9pm) raids the archives for performances from Just Can’t Get Enough through to Personal Jesus. Later, Depeche Mode 101 (11pm) is DA Pennebaker’s documentary, framed around their 1989 show at California’s Pasadena Rose Bowl, just as they became one of the biggest alternative tribes in the world. Shame they haven’t also managed to dig up Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams’s excellent The Posters Came From The Walls – one of the best films ever made on fandom – but you can’t have everything.

Saturday

An Evening With Take That

8.30pm, STV

Am I the only one seeing weird Brexit references buried everywhere this week? The press information for tonight’s special spectacular with what’s left of

the man-band makes a point of specifying that fans “from all over Europe” have been invited to come along for tonight’s show. All. Over. Europe. Take That know where it’s at. The ostensible cause for all the commotion, though, is their new album, Wonderland, for which they’ve come up with a new vision, set in “a unique, bright, optimistic world, where all is not what it seems.” Whatever this drug-fuelled fantasia is all about, Gary, Mark and Howard will be performing songs from the new LP and busting out with some fly new moves,

as well as taking requests for old favourites from the music hall years. They’ll also be answering questions from the audience, who have been asked to come along wearing their own costume designs for the event. How many will turn up dressed as Michael Gove?

LAST WEEK'S HIGHLIGHTS

In a momentous week, when the eyes of the continent – nay, the planet; the universe – turned toward the UK,

where they should always be fixed anyway, because we’re that special, there was only one image on TV anyone wanted to talk about. But we’ll get to Ken Barlow in a moment.

Before that, though, the two latest pin-ups to tuck safely away in your Brexciting! scrapbook. The first, of course, was the photograph of Theresa May signing her Article 50 letter, looking exactly like the registrar at a wedding to which nobody came. Fully conscious of the earth-shattering historic import of the photo-op, it was a masterpiece of composition, coded with enough subliminal symbols to give Dan Brown a juicy three-book deal. Directly above her head, that clock, frozen forever at just-before-twenty-to-five, a time that has long held deep emotional significance for the people of these islands. Directly over that, the oil portrait of Droopy, the deceptively depressed dog that has traditionally been the British People’s favourite among the old MGM cartoon characters.

To her left and to her right, conspicuously empty chairs, emblematic of our bold and exciting future. And, drooping at her left shoulder, where The Devil sits, the very flag once hoisted by Captain Mainwaring’s Walmington-On-Sea platoon. (The Dad’s Army references in the letter itself were a nice touch. Opening with “Don’t Panic!” offered the warm, friendly, velvet glove; the late comment, while discussing security collaboration, that “we know you don’t like it up you,” conveyed the cold, hidden steel.)

On Wednesday, after having heard all morning about how he was going to drive up the street and hand-deliver the letter, I was particularly eager to see live coverage of Our Man In Brussels, Tim “Brooke-Taylor” Barrow, driving up that street and hand-delivering the sucker. Unfortunately, I tuned into The Daily Politics (BBC Two) as the best bet for footage of The Post Route That Shook The World, and, mesmerised by Andrew Neil, forgot to flip around when it didn’t come. Again, though, there was the photograph: Barrow, looking every inch like a man secretly wearing red-white-and-blue pants; Donald Tusk, looking like the winner of a minor local lottery who’d just realised he’d forgot to tick the boxes specifying No Publicity.

These things, too, will pass. Some things have consequences that will resonate into the future. And so, Ken Barlow, found unconscious at the foot of the stairs inside No.1. In such a week, it’s hard not to suspect the vast, mysterious minds behind Coronation Street (ITV) are offering us allegory, Ken as the UK’s battered old body, the suspects aspects of the restless nation: Phelan, the disenfranchised who just wanted to stick it to the elite; Adam Barlow, the independent Scot; Daniel, bright tormented youth facing a dim, uncertain future; Peter and Tracy, the eternal yin and yang of our self-destructive streak; Eccles, just cuddly. Who did it? My money remains on Amy. Battered him with her violin, after playing Ode To Joy.