Monday's best TV: My Brilliant Friend, Last Week Tonight and Blood

First of all, they’ve not ruined it.

Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend is known for its intricate descriptions and nuance, and is loved by everyone from Hillary Clinton to Alice Sebold.

So fans have set the bar high for this adaptation. If this first episode is anything to go by, they won’t be disappointed. It’s both faithful to the book and will open the story up to new audiences.

It begins, as the novel does, with Elena receiving a phone call from the son of childhood friend Raffaella Cerullo, who she calls Lila. Lila has disappeared, and not for the first time. It’s one dramatic gesture too far for Elena. Angry, she casts her mind back to her Fifties childhood, tracing how she and Lila became friends on a warm spring evening in Naples.

Ferrante was on board as a screenwriter (via email to preserve her secret identity). She struggled seeing her work stripped down to a screenplay but she was happy with the result. They even speak in the Neapolitan dialect of the Fifties so Italian viewers need subtitles too.

Before they utter a word you can immediately tell who is Elena and who is Lila — they have captured Elena’s curiosity and Lila’s irrepressible spirit and ambition. They wear covetable industrial-chic pinafores and knits in shades of grey and navy, with starched white collars.

More than 8,000 children and 500 adults auditioned for the show and the leads have no acting experience. Ludovica Nasti (Lila) had leukaemia when she was younger. Now 12, she is still unsure whether she wants to be a footballer or an actress when she grows up.

Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, which this is the first part of, has been adapted before, including for the stage last year by April De Angelis at the Rose Theatre Kingston. That play packed 50 years into five-and-a-half hours, and while it pulled off the competitive tug of the girls’ friendship and the struggles they faced in a corrupt and sexist society, it lost much of the book’s texture.

This series takes it slower. There are eight episodes, which bring viewers to the end of book one, and a further three series are planned. There’s more than enough drama in the girls’ friendship to sustain four series. Each girl wants what the other has and there’s a volatile, shifting power balance. But it’s also about wider society. A voiceover stops you from getting lost in their tangled world of Mafia dons, arrogant teenage boys and hard-done-by women. No one is straightforwardly good or bad.

Shady older men reign supreme and bristle when little girls — yet to learn that they are supposed to be subordinate — stand up to them. There are a few strong female role models, notably a teacher who resembles Quentin Blake’s Miss Trunchbull illustration.

It looks like the Naples Ferrante describes, down to the exact grey of the fascist-era buildings. The set designer wanted the colour used by Picasso in his Guernica painting and they created 10 different shades before finding the right one. People live on top of each other, intertwined with each other’s business. There’s an enjoyable theatricality in scenes where neighbours shout at each other from their balconies over drying sheets – and the swearing sounds better in Italian too.

This adaptation runs counter to the mood of the isolationist government in Italy. It is opening up the country’s history and it’s a credit to Ferrante.

Pick of the day

Last Week Tonight - Sky Atlantic, 10.05pm

John Oliver has been on ferocious form recently as host of the satirical news magazine.

Only last week, for instance, he took aim at President Trump’s pre-election claim that he would “drain the swamp” of the Washington establishment.

Delivering a 16-minute long monologue, he concluded by saying that anyone holding out for the President to honour this promise could “officially kissy face that idea goodbye”.

It’s easy to mock, of course, and the President offers a big target, but Oliver’s methods are forensic. True, that mention of a “kissy face” was a backhanded reference to the amorous gesture made by Trump towards Bo Derek in the film Ghosts Can’t Do It (“the single most disgusting thing that has ever been in a movie,” according to Oliver).

But he’s precise in his methods, too, detailing the number of Trump appointees who have links to special interest groups.

Oliver responds to the news of the week, so he may not feel the need to mention the President tonight — but don’t bet on it.

Screen time

Blood - Channel 5, 9pm

Written by Sophie Petzal (Riviera, The Last Kingdom), this thriller stars Adrian Dunbar as Jim Hogan, a doctor in a small Irish town whose reputation comes under attack when his daughter Cat (Carolina Main) returns home from Dublin.

She has her own problems, but the apparently accidental death of her mother prompts her to re-examine her own past.

There is bad blood between Cat and her father, thanks to a long-buried family secret, and she starts to think that he may have more to do with her mother’s death than he is letting on.

Gráinne Keenan plays Jim’s oldest child, Fiona, who has a secret of her own, and Diarmuid Noyes is the middle child, Michael, who is gay but fearful of revealing this to his father.

London Live Sessions - London Live, 7pm

You Me at Six will see you, me at seven, as the best-selling band will be performing on London Live Sessions tonight. The group recently released VI, their sixth album, on their own label Underdog Records and are off on a major UK tour later this month, ahead of a European tour next February, so this is a rare chance to see them in an intimate venue.

The Guv’nor - London Live, 11pm

“As soon as I saw him I thought, ‘If I ever end up making a movie, he’s going to be in it’,” says Guy Ritchie on catching sight of the fearsome Lenny McLean — and he was good on his word, since casting McLean in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels as Barry The Baptist.

McLean’s route to film hard-man stardom came after a long and bruising working life as a genuine, real-life hard man — his career as a bare-knuckle and unlicensed boxer is said to tally upwards of 4,000 fights. Then there was the association with the Krays.

What this documentary doesn’t swerve from addressing is the source of his notorious ringside rage, as his son Jamie opens windows into his father’s distressing childhood.

Serial box

Mirzapur​- Amazon Prime Video

Amazon’s policy of commissioning Indian drama continues with this tale of a crime dynasty operating in the wild town of Mirzapur, in Uttar Pradesh. It stars Pankaj Tripathi as the head of an influential crime family. The cast of characters, said The Hindustan Times, “is comprised entirely of psychopaths”.

Of course, that may appeal to the growing international audience for Indian hoodlum dramas.

Catch up

The Kinks: Echoes of a World - Sky On Demand

The Kinks’ great album Village Green Preservation Society has been given the deluxe reissue treatment, fitting for an apparently whimsical record which emerged as psychedelia took hold 50 years ago. It was a highpoint for Ray Davies, above, and his group, and its reputation still grows. Kinks disciples Paul Weller and Suggs (of Madness) are among those paying tribute.