Sunday

SS-GB

9pm, BBC One

“Himmler’s got the king locked up in the Tower Of London…” So, without messing, begins Len Deighton’s 1978 novel SS-GB. In just 11 words of dialogue, time and place are established, along with the sense that something is very wrong with this picture indeed.

The BBC’s five-part adaptation of SS-GB opens a little bigger, but a little softer, with a tease, then a dramatic flourish. We see damp green fields and a single Spitfire, that stubborn symbol of plucky British freedom, roaring above. For a second, it seems the usual Second World War homefront drama landscape. Then, as the plane swoops on to London and bumps down in the Mall, the camera pans to reveal a battered Buckingham Palace, surrounded by swastikas.

Both openings get us to the same point. It is winter 1941, 14 months after the Battle Of Britain, which, in the version of history Deighton offers, the Germans won. The UK has fallen beneath the Nazi jackboot and, although rumours of resistance persist, the occupation is complete.

As the Reich grinds down, we meet our protagonist, Douglas Archer (Sam Riley), a talented London police detective, who, despite new offices at Scotland Yard bearing names like “Department Of Illegals,” is trying to turn a blind eye and convince himself he’s still doing the same job he always did. A new case presents itself: a man murdered in a black market dispute. But Archer spots clues that suggest a different reading. And when an SS officer is flown in from Berlin to supervise the investigation, he finds himself in a bigger story, and forced to make choices.

Does it say something that SS-GB is one of two current TV dramas imagining what if the fascists had won the war? But Deighton’s concerns are very different to those of Philip K Dick, whose Man In The High Castle provides loose inspiration for Amazon’s alternative-history series about a Nazi USA.

Dick came out of sci-fi and questioned reality. Deighton is most famous for his excellent, chippy, espionage novels, and, although there’s usually something else going on beneath the surface, he tackles messy reality head on, then tries to work out our place in it.

In SS-GB he does three things. His topline is the detective story. This, though, is just the hook into the larger project: a portrait of how the Nazi occupation of Britain would have worked, its nuts and bolts. It’s a serious undertaking. An ex-RAF man, Deighton’s war novels are meticulously researched, while his 1977 non-fiction book on the Battle Of Britain, Fighter, drew praise from Albert Speer. Born in 1929, he remembers the period well, imbuing the book with a strange sensory credibility: it’s his memory of Blitz atmosphere, multiplied to nightmare.

The TV adaptation is faithful, but, at first, struggles to convince. Like many period pieces, you have to get beyond the sense of people playing dress-up: the sound of Zippo lighters on the soundtrack gets as intrusive as the music. Mind you, Riley’s costume is straight from Deighton, who cast Archer as a dandy, favouring dark shirts and wide-brimmed hats based on George Raft gangster movies.

Gradually, though, it pulls you in. Deighton’s tough pulp provides strong roots, while Riley has a mix of intensity and distance the camera loves, even if it takes a while to get used to his gravelly John Hurt whisper. Most remarkable, though, is how quickly you accept the unsettling picture of this occupied Britain. Thus established, beneath the popcorn thriller plot, the framework smuggles in the third thing Deighton’s story does: it asks, if this had happened, if you’d been there, what would you have done?

Monday

Storyville: Life, Animated

9pm, BBC Four

Roger Ross Williams’s Oscar-nominated documentary may leave some viewers wishing certain areas were explored at more length, but it’s a fascinating and undeniably moving story. The subject is Owen Suskind, who, as a three-year-old in the early-1990s, was diagnosed with autism. He rapidly retreated into near silence, uttering only gibberish, a process his parents compare to “a kidnapping.” Among their shared joys, however, were the animated Disney movies Owen watched repeatedly, and, after several years, an unexpected breakthrough occurred: Owen started repeating dialogue from the films, and, rather than just a parroting, his parents realised he was using the lines to communicate, and understand the world. Slightly frustratingly, the documentary skips many details about how his language developed, but this is a film that’s as much about parents’ love, hopes and fears for their children as it is about autism. We catch up with Owen today, a young man preparing to leave home – something that would once have seemed impossible – and beginning to experience feelings even Disney can’t teach you about.

Tuesday

Inside No 9

10pm, BBC Two

Hot on the cloven heels of their Christmas cracker, television’s current masters of sticky claustrophobia, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, are back for a full third series of their mischievous and macabre anthology show, in which, each week, a new tale of the unexpected unfolds inside a different “Number 9.” While it might seem as if they’ve imposed severe limitations on themselves with the restricted conditions of these short, single-location stories, the opposite is true: the writers are stretching and exploding in all kinds of directions. Directed by series regular Guillem Morales, tonight’s nasty comedy is set in a restaurant just after closing, as three pals (Pemberton, Shearsmith and Jason Watkins) and a new acquaintance (Philip Glenister) begin to squabble over how they’ll split the bill. Soon, all sorts of festering issues are bubbling up and spilling out into the open, but there’s always something else waiting to be revealed. Ellie White (who was great in Vic and Bob’s House Of Fools), plays the unfortunate waitress looking on from the sidelines.

Wednesday

The Royal House Of Windsor

9pm, Channel 4

This year, the Windsor family will celebrate a century on the British throne. Marking the date, this six-part documentary considers how, despite the scandals, feuds and crises in the branches of the family tree, they mastered “the dark arts of survival,” enduring to become the most famous/ most tourist-friendly royal family in the world, while many other such dynasties (including their relatives) have faded. There’s nothing monarchy-threateningly controversial lurking, but, with contributions from historians and extended members of the family, and access to the Queen’s own personal family archive, it’s a detailed and insightful history, if you’re looking for one. The first episode begins by considering how, 100 years ago, George V taught the family its first great lesson in surviving. At the height of the First World War, hatred of all things German was running high in the UK – and that included the royals, who then bore the family name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Thus, the king undertook a blatant royal rebranding exercise, ditching the name for the infinitely more British-sounding “Windsor.”

Thursday

Gap Year

9pm, E4

High Maintenance

10pm, Sky Atlantic

Two interesting new sitcoms tonight. Written by Tom Basden, Gap Year follows two young British pals Sean and Dylan (Ade Oyefeso and Anders Hayward) on a backpacking odyssey, a trip of a lifetime they hope will involve lots of beer, girls and good times. Trouble is, they’ve picked China as their destination and, as they begin to realise, Beijing isn’t the world’s greatest beach resort. Meanwhile, amid the culture shock, Dylan hasn’t told Sean everything about the trip. It’s an amiable opening episode, made easier to watch by the locations, and a cast including faces like Janeane Garofalo and a big role for Tim Key, excellent as an older traveller seeking to relive his youth. On Sky Atlantic, High Maintenance (which started as an online series) is one of the best new American comedies. At its centre is “The Guy” (co-writer/director Ben Sinclair), a marijuana dealer floating through New York on his bike, visiting clients, each of whom has their own story. A slow, strangely focussed, dreamlike wooze.

Friday

Patriot

Amazon Prime Video

Amazon’s latest series applies Coen Brothers-esque dumbness, deadpan and melancholy to modern day espionage. Our sort-of hero is US intelligence officer John Tavner (Michael Dorman, with a numbed thousand-yard stare), who has been assigned the task of preventing Iran achieve its nuclear ambitions. As it turns out, this means him going deep cover and landing a job as a middle-grade executive at a humdrum piping company in the industrial grey badlands of Milwaukee. But pursuing his mission while keeping up his front becomes increasingly difficult; especially when Tavner, an Iraq veteran, is dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. With its abrupt spurts of violence (Tanver secures his job at the piping plant by brutally removing his chief rival) and blankly absurd tone (he deals with stress by composing and singing folk tunes), it won’t be for everyone. But it’s a promising start and there are excellent performances, including Lost’s Terry O’Quinn as Tavner’s spook father/ spy boss, and fellow veteran hardass Kurtwood Smith as his boss at the factory.

Saturday

Where You’re Meant To Be

10.45pm, BBC Two

“Folk music,” Bob Dylan once said, when he’d started annoying the purists, “is a bunch of fat people.” A similar, woollier clash between traditionalists and modernisers lies at the heart of this wonderful road trip documentary by Paul Fegan, a Weird’s Way following Arab Strap singer Aidan Moffat on a mission to perform his own mordantly remodelled versions of old Scottish folk tunes on a tour around some of the country’s furthest flung venues. Part of the gloomy charm is watching him as a fish landed in unfamiliar water in places like the Isle Of Lewis, playing for audiences who don’t care who he is, or like what he’s doing. But the project takes on another dimension when he encounters the formidable folk singer Sheila Stewart, who disapproves, argues that he barely understands the songs, and underlines her point with her own powerful performances. Her death shortly after filming adds poignancy to her claim that her oral tradition will end with her, but the film is a raggedy tribute to them both.

LAST WEEK...

I’ve watched it three times now and still can’t tell. Was this week’s Bedtime Story (CBeebies), “The Cloudspotter,” a lovely little tale about the power of imagination and the importance of friendship? Or was it the most bleak and melancholy three minutes of TV that 2017 has so far delivered that wasn’t part of the news or Let It Shine?

Part of the confusion is due to the storyteller, Tom Hardy, making a welcome return to the Bedtime Story chair following his epochal rendition of “You Must Bring A Hat” on Hogmanay. That date, we must assume now, was chosen specifically for its supernatural potency, with the story itself performed as a kind of invocation spell, a hypnotic hex preparing our minds for the imminent coming of his other current BBC series, Taboo, in which, indeed, he does bring a hat, like you wouldn’t believe.

Watching Hardy read a wee sleepytime bye-bye for teeny tots would be a curious experience at any time. But seeing him do it while Taboo is still running is mind warping. In the same way his character in the Saturday night drama is beset by ghostly visions, the Bedtime Story viewer is helplessly battered by flashbacks to the weekend. For instance, as genuinely brilliant as Hardy is at delivering this stuff, it took me a while to get into him reading “The Cloudspotter,” because the last time I’d seen him, he ripped out a man’s tongue, then attempted to strangle his own sister while they were making love, because, right in the middle, he’d started thinking about his dead mother. This didn’t happen when Brian Cant appeared on Jackanory.

Leaving aside the lingering fear that, any minute, Hardy might turn and eviscerate the teddy bear at his side and eat its insides, nothing horrible happened in “The Cloudspotter,” of course. Except…did it? The story concerned a little boy with no friends who takes solace in spotting shapes in the clouds – trains and castles and cars – and making up stories about them. One day, he’s joined by a scruffy dog, who tries to join in. Annoyed, the kid gets rid of the dog, sending him floating helplessly off alone in a hot air balloon. But then he realises: the dog was just looking for a pal, and he wishes he was still around, because, “everyone knows, two cloudspotters are better than one.”

The accompanying illustrations suggested that the boy and the dog got back together again in the end and were best buddies forever. But the story itself didn’t mention this. In fact, it seemed to suggest that, hit by the realisation he’d destroyed his one chance at friendship, the boy was doomed to live a life of crushing loneliness and regret.

It’s on iPlayer, so decide for yourself. But the image of that poor dog, left howling and starving alone in the endless sky, has haunted me all week. “I’ll see you very soon for another bedtime story,” Hardy threatened at the end.