Damien Love gives his verdict on the best of TV Sunday, October 19, - Saturday, October 25

Gothic Season

Across the week, BBC Four

With the honourable exception of Strictly's annual fancy dress edition, British television has pretty much dropped the ball when it comes to marking Halloween in recent years. So it's heartening to see BBC Four pushing the black boat out this year with a seasonal season devoted to all things gothic. They're saving some of the juiciest fare until next week, of course, to coincide with the night of The Great Pumpkin itself, but there's a nicely gloomy bunch getting the wake started this week.

Of the new shows, pick of the litter is The Art Of Gothic: Britain's Midnight Hour (Monday, 9pm), yet another excellent three-parter from the uncanny Andrew Graham-Dixon, who has made so many fine series in 2014 you have to suspect the BBC Arts Department has succeeded in cloning him, in some horrific experiment contrary to the laws of god and man.

Splendidly presented by AG-D dressed all in black while shuffling melancholy and alone around the grey, mouldering ruins of derelict castles and decaying abbeys, it's an erudite soup-to-nuts that takes in literature, art and architecture while tracing how the meaning of "gothic," has mutated down the centuries.

For Renaissance artists, the term began as an insult, reserved for "barbaric" mediaeval traditions not rooted in the rational lines of ancient Rome and Greece. It was the Britons of the Georgian period who first imbued the term with connotations of weirdness, terror and dark romance, as they began to look back to the mists and shadows of the past with yearning, longing to re-inject some sublime shivers of mystery and the unknowable into their fast-changing modern world.

Another of the BBC's most formidable documentary gargoyles, Whispering Dan Cruickshank, leaps from his belfry to bite into one aspect of this story with The Family That Built Modern Britain (Tuesday, 9pm), a film on Gothic revivalist architect George Gilbert Scott, his son George Gilbert Jr, and his son, Giles.

The boys get their due: GG Jr managed a string of notable buildings before a marvellously scandalous decline involving drink, madness, religion and a Frenchwoman; and Giles designed the red telephone box. But this is the old man's show, as Cruickshank breathlessly sings the praises, ogles the spires and fingers the detailing of his great 19th century works, including London's St Pancras Hotel, whose red-brick grandeur was famously hymned by John Betjeman as "too beautiful and too romantic to survive."

However, the real joy in any BBC Four season is often the old shows exhumed from the archives, and this week's trip into the crypt is no exception. There's another welcome showing for Mark Gatiss's loving 2012 survey of vividly insane continental horror movies, Horror Europa (Sunday, 10.20pm). But the night to turn your phone off is Tuesday, when Cruickshank's documentary is followed by a double-bill of brilliantly batty drama.

First, The Life And Loves Of A She Devil (Tuesday, 10pm), beginning a full repeat for the sly, barking, mad and venomous 1986 adaptation of Fay Weldon's novel, with that remarkable central performance by Julie T Wallace as the "ugly woman" out for revenge against boorish husband Dennis Waterman and his glamorous lover Patricia Hodge, and a delightful turn by Tom Baker as an intensely randy alcoholic priest. Markedly different in tone, but just as good, is the vampire story Dorabella (Tuesday, 11pm), one of the best tales from the 1977 anthology series Supernatural. No gore, no shocks, no budget; plenty of story, atmosphere, suggestion, and dread. Just the ticket.

Sunday, October 19

The Sunny

10pm, BBC Two

It's only a one-off pilot for now, but this new sitcom project from Burnistoun's Iain Connell and Robert Florence bodes well for a full series - for my money, it's streets ahead of their 2006 sitcom, Legit. The Sunny is The Sunshine Centre, a well-used, down-at-heel community hall in some rainy corner of Glasgow, where a mixed bag of regulars bump elbows, because they have nowhere else to go. At the centre of the centre is Margaret (Still Game/Me Too immortal Jane McCarry), whose narration guides us around. As we begin, the place is in a flurry because a local-boy-made-good is scheduled to pay a celebrity visit: Charlie Dolan (Florence), who found fame with his 1990s band The Shoe Ponies (the perfect 1990s Glasgow band name), to the chagrin of his ex-pal Joe (Connell), who never made it out and now volunteers as The Sunny's caretaker. Florence and Connell's writing mixes the well observed and the plain daft, spiked banter with real warmth. But the true joy is the incredibly strong cast they've assembled, with great work from Paul Higgins, Aisling Bea and Stephen McCole, each given a character who could lead a sitcom of their own.

Tuesday, October 21

You Can't Get The Staff

9pm, Channel 4

Wednesday night's Grayson Perry documentary series is something of a delight, a good example of a modern equivalent to the kind of thing Channel 4 used to do, way back when it wasn't just a lazy, cheap, populist, disingenuous ratings-chasing ragbag of sneering smugness and phony shock tactics dressed up as the caring-sharing cutting edge. This, on the other hand, is a par-for-the-course example of the kind of thing they commission now. Basically, it's another chance to snigger into your drink at ditzy toff "eccentrics," going behind the scenes at stately homes as various gin-addled sorts who can trace their ancestry back to Alexander III (and probably have children who work for the production companies Channel 4 tends to use these days) hire butlers and gardeners. Cue comedy music and an ironic voiceover of exactly the same kind that bubbles under everything from The F***ing Fulfords to Come Dine With Me. Well done, everyone, yaw, yaw, yaw.

Wednesday, October 22

Grayson Perry: Who Are You?

10pm, Channel 4

A genuine highlight. If you've caught any of Grayson Perry's previous broadcasting you won't be surprised to hear his new series is a gem. The programme follows the artist as he makes portraits of various sitters in a variety of media (including, of course, pots). But we're some distance from Star Portraits. For one thing, Perry isn't bothered with immortalising the great and the good, concentrating more on individuals with stories that interest him, although there are well-known faces: the headline-grabbing draw of this first episode is fallen-from-grace LibDem politician Chris Huhne. For another, as the title indicates, Perry is more concerned with exploring identity - how we choose to present ourselves, how we are perceived, and what lies beneath - than capturing a likeness. In this, however, he cuts to the core of the portrait as an art form, describing the artist's job as "part-psychologist, part-detective: get it right, it tells you something a thousand selfies never could." This week's subjects include Kayleigh, a young white mother from Kent, who converted to Islam; and Jazz, who was born a girl, but lives as a man. You sense Perry is most interested in these, but his encounters with Huhne - which begin with a dinner at Huhne's house the night before his prison sentencing, during which he compares himself to the martyred St Sebastian - are fascinating for a different reason.

Thursday, October 23

Life Story

9pm, BBC One

Here he comes again. We've been spoiled so much by them that we sometimes take for granted just how incredible-looking are the series David Attenborough makes with the BBC's Natural History Unit. This new tour de force is no exception, and, in fact, pushes the envelope further. Now 88, Attenborough takes as his subject this time the journey through life: the huge odds creatures must overcome from the moment of birth to reach the point where they successfully produce offspring of their own. Pro that he is, Attenborough begins with one of the hits, hunkering down with baby meerkats. But the sequence you'll remember (if you make it through it) comes next, as, if they are to survive, five, tiny, fluffy, flightless, two-day-old barnacle geese must leap from their nest atop a savage rock tower and join their parents in the bleak, rubble-strewn valley 400 feet below. Be warned, it's heart-stopping and heart-breaking. Life at its cruellest and most astonishing, filmed by a team of geniuses, with sound effects by a sadist, presented by the master.

Friday, October 24

Unreported World: Siberia's Next Supermodels 7.35pm, Channel 4

In a fascinating, slightly unsettling snapshot of the way global market forces impact on individual lives, Marcel Theroux (Louis's brother) reports on how rising demand from countries like China and Japan is fuelling an unlikely goldrush among fashion scouts and modelling agencies in Siberia. Some 2,500 miles from Moscow, Irkutsk in Siberia seems a drab, depressed world away from high fashion. Yet here Theroux meets Alyona Belousova, a scout whose signings have worked with some of the biggest names in Europe. She now names China as her biggest market and regularly hunts the city's streets and shopping malls for young women with the right looks - tall, thin, young, European - for her hungry clients in the far east. There are plenty of nervous teenage hopefuls ready to take a shot at the high-glamour life. Travelling to Shanghai, however, Theroux discovers a business closer to a cattle market, and charts how the harsh reality that awaits often falls very short of the dream.

Saturday, October 25

Doctor Who

8.20pm, BBC One

This series took a definite upward surge over the past couple of weeks, thanks to the consistently great Capaldi finally being given two terrifically entertaining episodes back-to-back - the unexpectedly tense mummy on the Orient Express romp, and last week's invasion of 2D aliens - both by Jamie Mathieson, a writer who understands weird killer monsters are what this programme often needs, especially if they are on the loose in abandoned underground tunnels. Tonight's isn't up to that par, but it has a little magic. Written by the generally splendid Frank Cottrell Boyce, the story sees the entire surface of the Earth suddenly swamped by a dense forest of trees. In leafy London, The Doctor tries to get to the roots of the arboreal invasion, with the help of a young class from Clara's Coal Hill School. With all the children on the loose in the Tardis, it's oddly reminiscent of a story from a 1960s Dr Who annual, and pretty charming on that level, although it feels slightly adrift after 8pm, and could do with a little less moony stuff about how lovely we're supposed to think Mr Pink is.