Another full week of new programming I am looking forward to viewing. Last week I recommended ‘Vanity Fair’ and what a disappointment sorry for that. I am more hopeful of this week’s selection and it’s great to see Strictly back … Christmas is coming and it’s the BBC who are the giving channel this week content wise. Celebrity Island is back on our screens with a bunch of celebs being parked on a Pacific island for our fun worth a watch who will break first and want to home.
Saturday – BBC1 – Strictly Come Dancing the Launch 7:35pm (New Series)
The pro-celebrity ballroom contest hosted by Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman returns, and its a piece of good news for some. But I doubt X-Factor supremo Simon Cowell, will be happy as Strictly trashes his show in the ratings. The judges are Shirley Ballas, Bruno Tonioli, Darcey Bussell and Craig Revel Horwood will be at their desk ready to pass judgement, good or bad.
Before the show, starts I always pick my favourite but I have had difficulty picking just one so I looked for some I think is on the greatest journey and believe its investigative journalist Stacey Dooley.
Sunday – Channel 4 – Battle of Britain: Model Squadron 8pm (New Series)
Radio controlled plane enthusiasts from Britain and Germany are brought together by historian James Holland to recreate three pivotal days in the most famous aerial battle of the Second World War, using specially designed model aircraft that are able to shoot each other down. The re-enactment picks up from July 4 1940, just a month after the Dunkirk evacuation when bombing of British shipping began as a prelude to invasion.
Sunday – Channel 4 – Celebrity Island with Bear Grylls 9pm (New Series)
Another party of celebrities brave a deserted Pacific island and it never goes right, which helps make it compulsive viewing. This year's team of castaways consists of Olympic rower James Cracknell, boxer Anthony Ogogo, Hollywood star Eric Roberts, Pete Wicks (Towie), Montana Brown (Love Island), transgender campaigner and journalist Paris Lees, actor Martin Kemp, TV medic Dr Saleyha Ahsan, former model Jo Wood and Roxanne Pallett (Emmerdale). Everyone will be wondering how woman of the moment Roxanna Pallett will make out after her disastrous stint on Celebrity Big Brother.
Pete takes charge as they look for a place to camp, but his decision to leave most of their fresh water behind stirs up resentment as the weather worsens.
Sunday – BBC2 – No Activity 10:30pm (New Series)
The premise is simple: two detective partners sit in their car on a stakeout, discussing whatever comes into their heads. Occasionally they report back on the radio what their surveillance has turned up (“Car 72: no activity”), but mostly they discuss trivia.
Meanwhile, inside the warehouse that they’re watching, two low-level criminals do much the same, and back at the police station, a pair of female radio dispatch officers fail to hit it off. It’s deliberately daft and inconsequential, but now and then, very funny.
Monday – BBC1 – Council House Crackdown 9:15am (New Series)
An early morning favourite of mine looking into social housing from people needing help and on the other side of the coin people abusing the system. In this opening episode Michelle Ackerley hears how a church pastor broke the law by sub-letting his social housing property and making thousands of pounds in unlawful profits.
Monday – Channel 4 – Travel Man 8:30pm (New Series)
Crystal Maze presenter Richard Ayoade returns with the offbeat tourism show and is joined in the first edition by comedian and Room 101 host Frank Skinner for a short break in Switzerland's largest city. Their two-day break in Zurich features trips to a football museum and the Cabaret Voltaire, which was the birthplace of the Dada art movement, while they also go on the steepest funicular railway in the world, pay homage to the Swiss army knife and go for a pedalo ride on Lake Zurich.
Monday – BBC1 – Strangers 9pm (New Series)
Jonah Mulray is an earnest professor who makes lame gags with his students and has never visited his wife Megan in Hong Kong, even though she spends huge amounts of time there, because he doesn’t trust planes.
But Jonah must make the trip under shattering circumstances when Megan (Dervla Kirwan) is killed in a car crash – and, by the way, the news of her death is delivered in the most public and unsympathetic way by a TV policeman.
We know Megan’s fate, we see it in the opening few minutes of this new thriller as Megan weeps while she leaves what sounds like a suspiciously final-sounding message on someone’s phone.
Monday – BBC2 - Black Earth Rising 9pm (New Series)
As a child, Kate Ashby was rescued from the horrific aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, being adopted and brought up in Britain by world-renowned international lawyer Eve Ashby. Now working as a legal investigator, she takes on the prosecution of a controversial militia leader who had once fought to stop the genocide, bringing her already strained relationship with Eve to breaking point.
Tuesday – Channel 5 – Celebs in Solitary: Meltdown 9:15pm (New Series)
In a world that has never been more connected, how would it feel to spend five days completely alone? That's the challenge facing four famous faces in this documentary experiment, presented by George Lamb over three nights this week. Confined to a small living quarters, they have food and drink, a bed and a toilet - all that is missing is human contact. The subjects are musician and documentary maker Professor Green, TV presenter Anthea Turner, strongman Eddie Hall and comedian Shazia Mirza. Will they all manage the full five days or ask to leave early?
Tuesday – Sky Atlantic – The Deuce 10pm (New Series)
Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Franco return in the series that mythologises the pimps and porn stars of 1970s New York. If ever a drama was as much about its setting as anything that actually happens,it’s this one. The re-creation of the dives around Times Square when it was at its lowest, seediest ebb is what makes The Deuce worth watching – along with the cast of lowlifes who ply their trade there.
The action has jumped five years to 1977, when Candy (Gyllenhaal) and Vinnie (Franco) have made it good. She wears fur, he wears sheepskin; her porn films make money and his bars are thriving in a world where disco co-exists with punk.
Wednesday – BBC2 – Trust 9pm (New Series)
Trust dramatises an infamous saga, the 1973 kidnapping in Italy of Getty’s wastrel grandson J Paul Getty III. But first, before the deed and the ransom demand and everything that followed, we meet the family, as Getty rules the roost at his enormous English country house where he keeps a harem of pliant concubines. Into this crashes JPG III, a drug-addled hippy who desperately needs cash.
But Grandad is a dreadful man, a master puppeteer who uses the promise of his wealth, to keep his family dancing. Sutherland is eerily good and the rest of the cast, including Anna Chancellor as his favourite girlfriend Penelope, is top-drawer.
Thursday – Channel 4 – No Offence 9pm (New Series)
Crowds gather for a mayoral debate between current incumbent Kashif Hassan and political underdog Caroline McCoy - only for the hustings to end in bloodshed when an assassin strikes. As Viv Deering and her team investigate, they are forced to infiltrate the far right, and their murky world of political benefactors, if they are to catch the culprit.
Thursday – ITV2 – Celebrity Juice 10pm (New Series)
Unsure why I picked this normally I watch it if there is nothing else to watch. I reckon I will give it ago and especially due to the line-up. EastEnders actor Danny Dyer, his daughter Dani and her Love Island co-star Jack Fincham, singer and presenter Ashley Roberts and funny man Paddy McGuinness join Keith Lemon, Holly Willoughby, and Fearne Cotton for this birthday edition kicking off the new run.
Friday – Sky One – A Discovery of Witches 9pm (New Series)
I love getting my teeth stuck into a new vampire series so I am
looking forward to this newbie. set among the dreaming spires of Oxford University. Dr Diana Bishop (Teresa Palmer) is an American historian – and reluctant witch – doing research into alchemy at the Bodleian Library when she manages to access a previously hidden old manuscript. But her discovery attracts the attention of a host of other characters, including geneticist – and a vampire. Sparks fly, but there is danger afoot. Why do witches and vampires, between whom there is no love lost, want the manuscript so badly?
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