It was a bittersweet return for Two Doors Down (BBC1, Friday). Simon Carlyle and Gregor Sharp’s comedy creation was all grown up, seven series now, and making its debut on primetime BBC1. Bless. Some of us remember when it was just a wee Hogmanay special built around the cooking of a steak pie.

There was no getting away from it, however. As if by some cosmic design, the opening episode was about a return to the Latimer Crescent family fold. Yet overshadowing everything were thoughts of a departure from that same fold. Carlyle died in August, aged too damn young, after writing and filming had finished. We don’t know yet if the show will go on after him.

It was a strange old opener, even without that knowledge in the background. God knows what first-time viewers in Godalming made of it, but this was Two Doors Down at its tragicomic finest, and who else should be at the heart of proceedings but Cathy’s clown, Colin (Jonathan Watson).

Colin invited the neighbours to a surprise birthday party for girlfriend Anne-Marie. He had pulled out all the stops for the newest member of the gang. Even if his feelings did not quite run to a balloon arch (“Maybe for a 40th or a 50th”), we knew this was a milestone on his long trek back from Cathy (Doon MacKichan) leaving him.

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The doorbell rang and who should stride in but the great long streak of lady petrol and bitchiness herself. Colin, the Laurence to Cathy’s Beverly at this Caledonian Abigail’s Party, was ecstatic, and promptly got on the phone to tell Anne-Marie she was dumped.

The others took more convincing, Beth (Annabel Weir) most of all. But Cathy won them round, much as Stalin did eastern Europe after the Second World War. “Cathy’s come home,” she trilled in triumph.

Who else but Carlyle and Sharp would take a harrowing Ken Loach drama about homelessness and get a laugh out of it?

If it was strictly sunshine you were after, Archie (ITVX/STV Player, Thursday) would have come up short. This four-part biopic of one Archie Leach, aka Cary Grant, had its palm trees and movie star mansions, or as much as the obviously small budget would stretch to, but it had its sights on being something more substantial than the usual drive-by peek at a star’s life.

We met Grant in the winter of his career, touring theatres with a one-man show. By his own admission, Cary Grant was a character he made up, “the perfect man” who would make up for a childhood blighted by poverty and abandonment.

No wonder he wanted to say goodbye to all that. But wherever Grant went, and no matter how adored he became, he could never shake off Archie.

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Jason Isaacs was superb as Grant. Tip of the hat, sir, for taking the dare. Physically it was not a twins separated at birth match. When the camera caught the wrong side, Isaacs looked as much like Cary Grant as I do. Yet when it got just the right angle, something magical happened. The voice did the rest.

Written by Jeff Pope (Philomena, Stan & Ollie and the recent Savile biopic), the series was “produced with the blessing” of Grant’s daughter, Jennifer, and his ex-wife, Dyan Cannon (on whose book it was based). This might have made the viewer wonder if the tale was going to be sugar-coated but to the family’s credit it was not.

Sure, it gave too much time to the ups and downs of his relationship with Cannon, and on the rare occasion it lightened up you wished it had left more time for humour. Yet by the end, Isaacs had done something remarkable in bringing Archie and Cary together. Watching this makes Grant’s achievements even more remarkable.

The reality competition show Squid Game: the Challenge (Netflix) was slavish in its devotion to the South Korean drama that spawned the idea. Everything was reproduced to the nth detail, from the spooky doll singing her red light, green light song to the vast dormitory.

The one thing that could not be carried over was the drama’s unique selling point. Give it 50 years (that long?) and you might get a game show in which the penalty for failure is death, but we are not there yet.

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The 456 contestants competing for the $4.56 million prize looked delighted to be in this giant Squid Game theme park, and before long the largely American crowd were behaving badly in all too watchable ways. I spy another hit for Netflix.

So the plans worked and Nigel made it into I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! (STV, nightly). To no one’s surprise he soon started on his hail-fellow-well-met shtick. Ant and Dec’s last foray into politics, when they joined in the pillorying of Boris, was a stroke of comedic genius, if only because it was so unexpected. But Farage, for £1.5 million, are you sure you want to plant your flag on that ant heap, boys?