Television loves to time travel. Rare is the drama that doesn’t interrupt proceedings early doors with a caption reading “x number of weeks/months/years earlier”.

At least with The Ex-Wife (Channel 5, Sunday) we only go back three months from an opening scene of women driving badly, one car appearing to chase the other.

Cue the caption and it’s back to the recent past and calmer times. Tasha (Celine Buckens) is staging the perfect anniversary dinner for husband Jack (Tom Mison) when his phone rings. It’s ex-wife Jen, elbowing her way into the marriage again, much to Tasha’s irritation.

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Jen always has an explanation for popping up everywhere, and Jack, he of the complicated facial hair, doesn’t see the harm in it really. Is Tasha being paranoid or is something going on? And just how long does Jack spend in the bathroom each morning doing his hair?

I’ll say one thing for The Ex-Wife - it does not hang about, going from 0-60 in no time. Bangers: Mad for Cars (Channel 4, Tuesday) adopts the same fast and furious approach. What a refreshing change from the usual car show fare. They’ve even got a woman on the team, like the old days (hello Angela Rippon, then Top Gear, now Strictly, always fabulous).

The name is Naomi Schiff, pro driver and F1 presenter, and very good she is too alongside co-host Tinie (the rapper formerly known asTinie Tempah).

Schiff aside, It remains a blokey affair, but there’s none of that antler locking and strained joshing that goes on in other car shows we could mention. That said, I think Farmer Clarkson would approve.

Breeders (Sky Comedy/Sky Showcase/Now, Friday) was back and in top form. One of the funniest comedies about family life in years, it is also the bleakest. Maybe there is a connection.

It is five years on since we last saw Paul and Ally (Martin Freeman and Daisy Haggard) and life as the parents of teenagers is only getting harder. Which means more shouting, more boozing and above all, more effing and jeffing. Only on Succession will you find more F-bombs dropped.

Breeders takes a lot of risks with its characters. It is not afraid to show them at their worst. This, the fourth and last series, looks like it is going to be the boldest and best yet, even if it did cause some initial confusion by being set five years on from where the last series ended. More time travel shenanigans.

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But first prize for mucking around with the calendar this week has to go to Bodies (Netflix, Friday), which has not one, not two but four maverick detectives operating in different years - 2023, 1941, 1890, and 2053. Each one is faced with the same scenario: a naked man is found dead in an alleyway. Who is he, and who is the mysterious person seemingly directing events across space and time?

I was quite happy dipping in and out of the four set-ups, any one of which could have supported a series on its own. But then Stephen Graham barged in on 2053 and tried to explain things, and everything became very confusing surprisingly quickly. By the third of eight episodes I had no idea what was going on. Graham’s accent, posh with hints of Scouse, was something else to puzzle over.

The Pigeon Tunnel (Apple TV+, Friday) brought together two titans, one of documentary making, the other spy literature, and let lucky old us listen in.

Errol Morris (who made the Oscar-winning The Fog of War) sat down with John le Carre for what is billed as the late writer’s most candid interview. With le Carre, though, it was always hard to separate fact and fiction because he liked it that way. Here, he describes being interviewed as “a performance art”, so how can we be sure this is not just another show for the cameras?

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That’s where Morris comes in, his big booming New York accent bouncing from behind the camera and hitting the former spy with questions and observations that tickle le Carre or challenge him in a way he is not used to. Either the Englishman deserved an Oscar for acting or he really was intrigued by Morris and ready to fill in some of the many blanks in his biography.

Based on le Carre’s memoir of the same name, The Pigeon Tunnel covers the same ground of childhood, service and career, with dramatic reconstructions and clips from film and television adding much to the mix.

It is a pleasure to listen to le Carre, speaking as he does in perfect sentences, and see him crack a smile every now and then. He is as sharp as one might imagine, and funny besides. He describes Kim Philby, for instance, as being “addicted” to betrayal. “If you’d given him your cat to look after for a couple of weeks he would have betrayed the cat somehow.” Me-ow.