Sunday

Undercover

9pm, BBC One

Peter Moffat’s thriller remains an easy watch, but, after a strong opening, it’s been leaking a lot of air as it goes – too many neat coincidences bolting it all together, too many annoyingly implausible moments hurriedly papered over. Still, though, at the heart of it, the acting of Sophie Okonedo and Adrian Lester remains fairly magnetic. We’re into the penultimate episode now, and, tonight, Nick’s 20-year secret is finally out: Maya knows her husband was an undercover cop, planted beside her back in the 1990s, and she’s left dealing with the revelation that the life she thought they shared has all been a lie. But has it? Their confrontation is a tour de force, but Okonedo shares an even more electric face-to-face later in the episode, as she goes to visit Peter Mackie (Ian Peck), the racist psychopath who had the vicious, fatal jail cell fight with Michael Antwi the night he died in 1996. Suddenly, in scenes like this, the programme generates an almost unbearable tension, and grips again.

Monday

Veep

10.10pm, Sky Atlantic

Veep addicts might feel nervous going into this fifth season of the scabrous and scatty comedy of American politics, as it marks the first since its creator, the godlike genius that is Armando Iannucci, “fired himself". But anyone worrying that, without him, the show might lose some of the frantic and poisonous Thick Of It vibe that Iannucci so successfully transplanted into the corridors of The West Wing should relax when they see who’s back directing tonight’s opening episode: Chris Addison, The Thick Of It’s Ollie himself. Indeed, it’s business as usual. In the aftermath of the tied elections and with recounts looming, Selina (the brilliant Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her team are scrambling for the high ground in an attempt to get one over on her rival, the oil-slick smooth Tom James (Hugh Laurie, proving again that he gives great baddie). But there are more pressing matters to attend to: for example, the spot on Selina’s face, which is swelling to the size of Mount Rushmore. And does she really look like that from behind?

Tuesday

Forest, Field And Sky: Art Out Of Nature

9pm, BBC Four

With its sublime landscape photography, this documentary about British land art by art historian James Fox is an entrancing, even refreshing hour of TV – you come away feeling like you’ve been on a quiet Zen holiday. Fox considers six artists who have devoted their lives to making work about, from, of and within the natural environment: alongside works made of forests, fields and sky, we also get paths, gardens and coasts. The first piece under consideration is one of the most stunning, David Nash’s “Ash Dome,” a living, changing creation, hidden deep in the forests of Wales, which Nash has been tending since 1978, encouraging the enchanted circle of trees he planted to bend and meet. Footage of artists like Nash and sculptor Andy Goldsworthy at work is invaluable, and, accompanied by a soundtrack of hypnotically well-chosen music, Fox’s film makes what is often considered a difficult artform to understand (exemplified by the invisible paths of Richard Long, an artist of walking) seem simply, entirely … natural.

Wednesday

Horizon: Ice Station Antarctica

8pm, BBC Two

You might know Peter Gibbs as the pleasant BBC weatherman who always delivers the bad news with an apologetic smile. But, if you’ve ever sensed something otherworldly about him here’s why: he’s actually a survivor from John Carpenter’s The Thing. Well, sort of. In the early 1980s, Gibbs lived and worked in the white wilds of Antarctica as a member of the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley Research Station, doing research into the hole in the Ozone layer. In this visually striking film, he makes the arduous 3,000-mile journey for a heartfelt return to Halley, now housed in an incredible, proper old-school sci-fi-looking building on legs. He gives a whirlwind tour of the mind-bending cutting-edge work taking place there today, including studies into the effects solar activity has on our lives, and research into surviving interplanetary travel. But he also reveals the Research Station is under threat. Built on an ice shelf that constantly shifts, a massive crack could soon see Halley cast adrift, floating off into the ocean on a massive iceberg.

Friday

When Pop Went Epic: The Crazy World Of The Concept Album

10pm, BBC Four

It was Frank Sinatra who first hit on the idea that, instead of just a bunch of songs, long-playing pop records might create a sustained mood, explore a theme. Frank made studies of joy (Songs For Swingin’ Lovers) and, more often, suicidal abandonment (Only The Lonely). After him, the next great exponent was Johnny Cash, with his albums about trains and Native Americans. Of course, though, when we hear the phrase “concept album,” we tend to immediately think of the gatefold prog story-cycle lunacies of the 1960s and 1970s: the likes of Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans and Pink Floyd’s doomy The Wall. While some others receive honourable mention (from Woody Guthrie to The Flaming Lips), the focus falls firmly on the hairier end of the spectrum in this documentary, presented, inevitably, by Rick Wakeman: the mastermind behind 1975’s shocking Myths And Legends Of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table, after all. Packed with new interviews and archive footage, it’s well Spinal Tap.

Thursday

Marseille

Netflix

Peaky Blinders

9pm, BBC Two

It’s slightly unfortunate that, prior to Marseille, the last thing most members of the international Gerard Depardieu-spotting society can remember seeing the big guy in was United Passions, the unfeasibly bad FIFA-sponsored vanity project that, hilariously timed to coincide with the corruption scandal, was swiftly dubbed simply “The Sepp Blatter Movie.”

The first thing we see in the new Netflix series is more football. The drama opens in the heat of a match being played in Marseille’s Stade Vélodrome, the stadium treated to classy, swooping aerial views, while, deep in its blue-lit bowels, Depardieu sits hoovering up a snootful of cocaine. For a minute, I thought I was streaming the wrong thing. But it turns out he’s not playing a high-ranking member of football’s governing body, after all. He’s the mayor of Marseille, so that’s okay.

A chewy mix of gloss, grit and garbage set in the backstabbing world of city politics, Marseille has been dubbed a “French House Of Cards” – although, to be fair, when it comes to such tales of steamy scheming, sex, politics, scandal and murder, the French actually got there first, back around the 18th century, with novels like Dangerous Liaisons. More than anything, though, Marseille at first recalls another, more recent French saga, the political drama Spin. Once again, the story sees a veteran player going into bitter battle against a young protégé who has betrayed him. Here, it’s Depardieu’s aging mayor, Robert Taro, who discovers that Lucas Barre (Benoit Magimel), the 40-something he took under his wing 20 years before, has just been waiting down there to stick the knife in.

Their war is personal, but at stake is the troubled soul of Marseille itself. Taro has been pushing to modernise and clean his city, gambling on a legacy-enhancing prestige project to create a shiny mega-casino in the docklands. But Mafia interests are against the scheme, and have Barres in their pocket. Meanwhile, around them, a cast of characters weave a web of wild coincidence: Taro’s young journalist daughter is pals both with Barres’s aide and a guy in the projects who happens to be connected to the gang that supplies Taro’s dugs, who are in turn connected to the mob that are out to get him, and so on.

Given Depardieu’s real-life talent for outrage, and the city’s reputation as a place where trouble and splendour collide hard, I went into Marseille anticipating the crazed tale of a bad mayor, juggling corruption while crashing around gassed-up on a moped with a gleeful white beak, and urinating explosively on carpets. In fact, in the episodes I’ve seen, Depardieu, despite the mayor’s drug habit, has been a pretty straight-ish hero, rumblingly reined in.

If that’s slightly disappointing, though, and if, on the Eurodrama scale, it’s not up in the top echelon with Spiral or Gomorrah (which returns soon), Marseille is still compelling as a trash soap. It’s like a big, suntan-lotion-spattered holiday beach read: the kind of thing where the bad guy and his femme fatale accomplice literally cook up their evil schemes while shagging and making evil naughty-leetle-puppy sex faces at each other. Nothing wrong with that.

In other city-of-corruption news, Peaky Blinders returns for a third series of Birmingham baddassery in flat caps. I’m still not convinced by the show, which I find tries a bit too hard on every front. But it’s always nice to hear Nick Cave coming from the TV speakers, and he gets two songs in this week.

Saturday

The Hollow Crown

9pm, BBC Two

The BBC’s latest Shakespeare season rolls on with the second instalment of the gargantuan adaptation of the historical plays that first began back in 2012 with magnificent versions of Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 and Henry V. This time around, we’re getting strange, muddy and star-stuffed takes on Henry VI Parts One, Two and Three and Richard III, all dealing with bloody events surrounding the War Of The Roses. First up, Tom Sturridge stars as Henry VI, the teenage king who, while Joan Of Arc inspires belligerent passion across the channel, rules in name only over a bitterly troubled English court, and is manoeuvred toward a controversial marriage with the French Margaret Of Anjou (Sophie Okonedo). Adrian Dunbar co-stars as the ambitious Plantagenet in a deep, wide and strong cast that includes Hugh Bonneville as Gloucester, Michael Gambon as Mortimer and Philip Glenister as Talbot, alongside the likes of Sally Hawkins and Anton Lesser.