Thursday

Catherine The Great

9pm, Sky Atlantic

Well, “great” is one word. Another is “massive”, as in “massive stinkeroo.” But if for no other reason, Sky Atlantic’s hot new take on Russia’s most famous 18th century empress is to be welcomed simply because it feels like a long time since we’ve seen a turkey stuffed and mounted on quite such an epic scale.

Sure, in recent years, we’ve had the odd bad drama, but far more regularly TV comes in a steady drip-drip-drip of shows that are sort of alright, which kill the time for as long as they last, and don’t last long in the memory thereafter. Catherine The Great, though, stands out from the numbing crowd by being so monumentally duff that the very dimensions of its badness stimulate the senses to a rare degree. Never mind that the first episode will be the only episode many of us will ever watch: at least we’ll remember it.

Barely had the opening please-pretend-this-is-something-to-do-with-Game-Of-Thrones title sequence faded, and I was already dazed, confounded by questions of a sort few TV shows dare to raise today: What the hell is happening here? Who is this supposed to be aimed at? What even is this?

To get down to cases, we are in 1762, and Catherine, aided by some court whisperers, has just seized the Russian throne from her husband, Peter III, who died mysteriously from piles in the process. This is all well and good, until we have to grapple with the fact that Catherine, at that time aged 32, is here played by the executive producer of the series, Helen Mirren, who turned 74 in July.

I raise this not for any ageist or sexist reasons, but just to lay the facts out, as I would if presented with Bill Nighy taking the lead in a biopic of Harry Styles. I’m not saying it’s wrong, and in many respects, you have to admire the chutzpah. But it sets a very weird vibration running underneath proceedings that threatens to collapse the entire edifice, even while everybody tries hard not to mention it.

Take, for example, Catherine’s relationship with her son, Prince Paul. The talented twenty-something playing the role, Joseph Quinn, can do many things, but, sadly, looking eight-years-old, as the actual Paul was in 1762, is not one of them, which leads to all kinds of nonsense as Catherine talks about him soon “coming of age.” Almost as demented is Catherine’s passion for Grigory Potemkin: there come great stretches where Catherine and her favoured countess pal (Gina McKee) are all a-flutter over “that ravishing young man” – it took me twenty minutes to realise they were referring to the character played by the 50-year-old Jason Clarke.

All this might be easier to swallow if the script lifted above the level of a Ladybird Guide To History, but once you’ve got the basics (see Catherine try to retain power; see men plot against her), there’s not much incisive human drama happening. Faced with this, Rory Kinnear, playing Catherine’s political advisor Panin, does the sensible thing: gives up, and phones in the same performance he gave in Count Arthur Strong, except with a wig.

To compensate, the production throws huge amounts of money around. Shot in historic palaces in Russia, Latvia and Lithuania, it’s all dazzlingly sumptuous décor and opulence, as if you’d had a Faberge egg smashed hard into each eyeball. But the effect is like watching a mad mega-budget adaptation of one of Ernie Wise’s old scripts, and slowly realising that Eric is just never going to appear.

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Today

World On Fire

9pm, BBC One

The BBC has been hyping its big new Second World War drama, but, despite a few effective moments, it’s a stodgy old worthy pudding, thick in exposition, thinly spread elsewhere. Opening in 1939, just before the German invasion of Poland, the series sets out to tell the tale of the conflict through the stories of cliches from across the globe, although the focus is mostly on photogenic young Brits, including Harry (Jonah Hauer-King), a translator in Warsaw, and his fascist-fighting girl back home, Lois (Julia Brown) who also sings with an unconvincing swing band. Helen Hunt co-stars as veteran American journalist Nancy Campbell, who’s trying to get the world to wake up to the Nazis’ evil, but the best performance is a lovely turn by Sean Bean as Lois’s father, a pacifist left with trauma from the last war.

Monday

Storyville: Tiananmen – The People V The Party 9pm, BBC Four This absorbing feature-length account of the pro-democracy demonstrations that ended in massacre as Chinese troops opened fire on protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square was made to mark the 30th anniversary of the killings. But director Ian MacMillan couldn’t have imagined quite how timely his film would be, coinciding with the new wave of protests in Hong Kong. Using archive footage, new testimony from protesters and witnesses, and a secretly filmed interview with a high-ranking Communist Party official who was privy to the government debates that led to the killings, the film reconstructs the seven weeks that saw peaceful demonstrations build into carnage. It’s a valuable document, given how the incident has been airbrushed from history in China, where accounts still vary on the numbers killed, from the official figure of 300, to estimates in the many thousands.

Tuesday

The Troubles: A Secret History

9pm, BBC Four

Yet more new information comes to light in the fourth episode of this valuable seven-part series, as reporter Jennifer O’Leary uncovers the story of how British intelligence agents went about infiltrating the ranks of the IRA. By the late 1970s, the IRA had grown so conscious about internal security that the organisation was seen as practically impossible to penetrate. But there was a flaw in the system that British operatives would learn to exploit, and with the help of informers they came to have knowledge of many of the group’s most closely guarded secrets. The results of this secret access would culminate in the bloody Loughgall ambush of 1987, when an IRA unit attacked an RUC police station, but came under fire from forewarned SAS soldiers, lying in wait around the target.

Wednesday

The Apprentice

9pm, BBC One

Even the most die-hard Apprentice fans must reckon the show went past its sell by date several series ago, and yet it keeps coming back, the same old joke over and over again, with everybody still pretending it’s new. Still, it passes the time, eh. This year, the research team have painstakingly auditioned 16 young would be business gits for our delectation, including at least one who looks like the rich villain bully kid from a 1960s children’s movie. For this first task, Lord Alan sends them to Cape Town, to set up and run two tour businesses in a day, just like you would in real life. As ever, Claude Littner and Karren Brady are along to cock their snoots. The sister show, You’re Fired, also returns on BBC Two tonight at 10.05pm, with new host Tom Allen.

Friday

Swamp Thing

Amazon Prime

Raising Dion

Netflix

Two new series based on comic books. The 10-part Swamp Thing gives new life to DC comics’ veteran icky eco-monster abomination, a kind of root vegetable Hulk, previously brought to the screen in a memorable 1980s movie. Crystal Reed plays scientist Abby Arcane, investigating the cause of strange, toxic mutations in the fetid, polluted bayous of Louisiana, where she encounters sad, disgraced boffin Alec Holland (Andy Bean), doomed to soon turn green and viney. Another 10-parter, Netflix’s Raising Dion is from Dennis Liu’s 2015 comic, about a widowed mother, Nicole (Alisha Wainwright), who finds the regular problems of single-handedly raising a seven-year-old son (Ja’Siah Young) grow more complicated, when the kid begins to display uncanny, superhero-like powers – and shadowy sorts seek to get their hands on him.

Saturday

The King’s Choice

9pm, BBC Four

The new series of Spiral is inching closer…but not yet. In the meantime, BBC Four keeps its Saturday night subtitles slot ticking over with this 2016 Norwegian movie, a period piece detailing how the country came to enter the Second World War. As the title suggests, the spotlight falls on the role of the King, Haakon VII (a fine performance from recent Bond villain Jesper Christensen). Essentially a ceremonial figure, as Nazi forces advance, he is forced to take a stand, and finds the resolve to rouse and lead his country into the conflict. With much of the movie focussing on backroom negotiations, particularly the king’s dealings with German envoy Curt Bräuer (Karl Markovics), it never quite conveys the tensions of the moment, but it’s a good history lesson, viewing the war from another perspective.