What to watch on TV this week: Twin Peaks, White Gold and The Handmaid's Tale

This week returns to Twin Peaks, keep your wallet away from the screen when the double-glazing salesmen of White Gold call, and London becomes a war zone in Bodyguard: A New Beginning.

Twin Peaks

‘I’ll see you again in 25 years’, slurred dead schoolgirl Laura Palmer to FBI agent Dale Cooper in the Las Vegas purgatory of the Red Room, a cryptic statement that no viewer would have swallowed as a literal promise. And, yet, here they are again; David Lynch and Mark Frost true to their own word, a self-fulfilling prophecy they could not escape, part of them also marooned in the Black Lodge.

This is the TV programme which left me so bereft and traumatised, it forever deterred me from travelling to a small Pacific Northwest town to investigate the murder of a popular girl. Twin Peaks also put me off coffee, cherry pie, and befriending a demon called Bob.

For those who didn’t stay up till 2am on Sunday night to learn if Agent Dale Cooper is still evil and headbutting mirrors, here is the more snooze-friendly transmission time. Information for the two-hour opening episode has been scarce, the contents of this epic is described as, ‘The stars turn and a time presents itself’. A damn fine tease for a show which changed TV and might yet again.

Out of respect for any fan ducking and diving reveals online and in real life, here be no spoilers. What gives nothing away is that Lynch remains a unique directorial talent, summoning dread and comic awkwardness with equal ease. This return is no small regurgitation for him and Frost, as the pair have expanded their canvas to match the drama’s status and to accommodate the cast of 217; we flit to New York, North Dakota, Las Vegas as well as Twin Peaks, new and perhaps pivotal characters brushing against townsfolk half-faded from memory.

In a time when nothing much makes sense these graceful bafflements are comforting, a word I never predicted you’d associate with Twin Peaks.

Sky Atlantic, Tuesday, 9pm

White Gold

In this new comedy there are people who need a windows update more than NHS hospitals or anyone else struck by ransomware. Created by Damon Beesley (White Gold, I mean, not the Wannacry virus), this reunites him with two of the cast of The Inbetweeners, on which he inflicted such teenage humiliations.

Rudge Park alumni Joe Thomas and James Buckley are duplicitous double-glazing salesmen Martin Lavender and Brian Fitzpatrick in 1983 Essex, a time of casual sexism, casual smoking, and casual perms, all of which are exploited by the script. Despite both Lavender and Fitzpatrick swaddling their necks in musk, they’re beta-salesmen to the showroom’s alpha, Vincent Swan (Ed Westwick), a Ford XR3i in Basildon’s finest polyester suit.

This era is a playground for cast and writer, the unreconstructed awfulness of these chancers and a less enlightened society the ingredients for bawdy scamming.

Wednesday, BBC Two, 10pm

Bodyguard: A New Beginning

Back in the 1990s the serious business of bodyguarding was brought into disrepute by pop star Rachel Marron, who distracted her bodyguard Kevin Costner by singing drippy love songs to him while he’s keeping an eye out for overly-devoted fans.

There is none of that moony romantic musical gubbins in this thriller, which takes the profession of bodyguarding far more seriously and it doesn’t even care if it doesn’t sell millions of copies of its soundtrack. There are bodies to be guarded and that must be its priority.

For Leung (Vincent Sze), the titular bodyguard, this means shifting his unwavering loyalty from defending his Hong Kong mob boss Wong (Richard Ng) to an enigmatic woman in London. This Chloe (Stephanie Langton) is a popular woman; she’s been targeted by a rival Triad gang, their interest requiring Leung to earn his wage and bruise his knuckles.

Add large scale street thrashings and a seditious son who wants to take over his father’s business, and you have an international thriller where one crime lord will end up as dead as the MP3.

Thursday, London Live, 10pm

The Handmaid’s Tale

A year after George Orwell’s iconic date by which all techno-invasive totalitarian futures are measured (or used as the basis for an entertainment game show), Margaret Atwood released The Handmaid’s Tale, a book whose homely title belies the horror within.

Over thirty years later its depiction of the Republic of Gilead, a fundamentalist and fascist Christian state that supplants the United States of America, has become the television sensation of the year.

It isn’t hard to understand why; when a candidate for The White House has spoken of grabbing women ‘by the pussy’ and is still elected as President of the USA, then a state where women are reduced to second and third-class citizens isn’t much of a stretch.

A handmaid in Gilead is a womb to bear the children of high-ranking government officials, a biological factory farm imprisoned in the home of their assigned master.

Through dashes of flashback and narration, the plight of Offred (Elisabeth Moss) is revealed, this first episode containing mild deviations from the book.

For dramatic impetus, this make sense – Offred’s life is spent in a silence that makes an abandoned crypt sound like Daft Punk headlining the Pyramid Stage. Unlike other dramas, the inclusion of the lead character as a narrator isn’t a cheap addition, as her internal monologue is where she remains rebellious, free, and desperate to locate her missing daughter.

Little of how Gilead has established itself is explained in this opening episode, nor how society incrementally surrendered all its values, but this does radiate the nihilism and insanity of its regime. Conversation will be generated by this, so cherish that dialogue.

Channel 4, Sunday, 9pm