The week in TV: Elizabeth Is Missing; The Case of Sally Challen; A Very Scandi Scandal and more

Elizabeth Is Missing (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Case of Sally Challen (BBC Two) | iPlayer
A Very Scandi Scandal (C4) | All 4
Traces | Alibi
Seven Worlds, One Planet (BBC One) | iPlayer

Elizabeth Is Missing has rightly been lauded, and how could it not be, other than for nudging us towards uncomfortable truths at this oh-so-happy time of year, that grand time of manically stressed mothers and pubs crammed with amateur drinkers. What it nudged us towards, forced us to consider, was the fresh global hell of Alzheimer’s: very soon, as we live longer, we will all know, perhaps dearly love, a sufferer. And it’s a stone bitch.

Ostensibly draped as a murder mystery from 1949, it coped absolutely grandly with that period strand: there was genuine tension in Maud’s fumbled unscrambling of links between the disappearance of sister Sukie and the “new houses” built back then, and the marrow flowers. But chiefly it dealt with Glenda Jackson, Maud’s, increasing fumbling of any unscrambling whatsoever, in the galloping throes of dementia.

Counterintuitively it wasn’t the fugues that most affected; the increasingly lost moments, Maud blinkingly confusing her own daughter with someone simply waiting for a bus, or forgetting she’d just visited the police the day before (and the day before). It was the lucid moments. Maud and her mental arithmetic (never unlearned) outside Elizabeth’s house, looking for the code to the key-box – “three from nine is six, seven from one can’t be done, carry the one – ha! 1946!” or just somehow obsessively knowing one was missing from her scrappy aide-memoire chronology of damp Post-its. In these moments we saw the spirited shadow of the woman that once was, the woman her old pal Elizabeth had taken to outside the Sally Army shop and enlisted as a zesty fellow gardener and confrere.

And saw, too, the miseries of the encroaching disease: the shamed, just-too-late incontinence, the silent screams; and also, crucially, the effect on families, chiefly harried daughter Helen (Helen Behan), caught between love and wall-punching despair, and between her mother and her daughter.

An unheralded quiet triumph in all: for inviting us to confront fears, because any life in which this disease has even a walk-on part will get messy. For original writer Emma Healey, adapter Andrea Gibb, director Aisling Walsh: and certainly for Jackson. In her 23 years as a Labour MP she was occasionally picked on as stern and righteous. Some might prefer to describe her as a defender of real and ignored lives. I interviewed her a barrel of years ago and found a crackling dry sense of humour, a throaty and ready bark of a laugh – and some of that echoed in this production. As, too, echoed the looks: that downturned overbite of a smile, which made her such a beauty in youth, was used to high effect in reverse. Like the few actors who have superseded that job description to attain a higher plane, she’s savagely unafraid to do ugly.

I do hold out hope, however, that fewer folk will have been directly affected by another of the week’s unfestive watches, and yet another must-watch. The Case of Sally Challen unravelled, with patience and a refreshing absence of sentimentality, the story of a wife who murdered her husband. And inter alia the story of the introduction in 2014 of the concept of “coercive control”: one, I think, of the very good reasons for a parliament being allowed to make new laws. If one of the very bad reasons for ditto is inept nebulous “hate crime” legislation, this is one of the good.

Challen’s tale was one of (very) early love (she 16, he 22) and marriage, and fun, and passion, and then slow-burn jealousy and control on the part of Richard. Even their son, the lovely and toweringly (surprisingly) sane David, who campaigned for his mum’s release, admitted “never violent. Just one of those characters you really don’t want to get on the wrong side of.” Sally Challen was anally raped, constantly usurped, by her first and possibly only love. Sally in earlier life could hold her own in an argument, and she smoked too much, and talked too much: and for that, essentially, she had to be demeaned, ordered what to wear, what to think, by hubbie, polishing his damned red Ferrari and cheating on her with paid two-at-a-times.

She’s free now. In both senses. Still misses him. In this absorbing feature we were given fleeting glimpses as to the complexity of surely all love. Note to puce-faced gentlemen out there who jokingly hide their hammers: coercion cannot be used itself as a defence against murder, only as an adjunct to a defence of diminished responsibility. Note to self: if I ever end up in chokey, I’d like lawyer Harriet Wistrich on my side.

Right. Fun. An utterly charming dramedy kicked off on All 4. A Very Scandi Scandal is hardly in Scandi-thriller mode: yet sweet and odd, like a lingonberry. Two professional women friends, doctor and teacher, find themselves in straits. One has taken appalling gambles with an investment portfolio, the other is victim of a divorce, a hitherto forgotten and ruinous prenup, and cloyingly self-righteous entitled school parents. Obviously, they decide to rob a bank.

It’s not as loopy as it sounds: every step is credible, even if the Dutch beards aren’t. It’s also deeply, wryly, funny every step of the way.

Traces launched for some unaccountable reason on Alibi, occasionally known as the “mad person’s channel”. It’s really honestly awful good: written by Amelia Bullmore, from a lightbulb moment by Val McDermid, it’s set in Dundee and, at least nominally, focuses on the work there pioneered by forensic anthropologist Professor Sue Black, to which McDermid owes such debts of insight.

My adopted home town is given a proud showing, rain notwithstanding, although I didn’t discern one Dundonian accent, what with all the Canadians and Aussies and weegees (Glasgow). You can take multiculturalism too far, dammit; we didn’t use to allow Longforgan in, let alone Fife. The cast is generally strong, Martin Compston, Laura Fraser, but my one niggle is, bizarrely, with Bafta-winner Molly Windsor, who simply seems too young and unworldly to carry the job of a labcoat let alone the responsibility of unearthing a dead mother. And there’s too much of this, at the moment, rather than the tech stuff, which astonishes: but I like it, moreishly.

Seven Worlds, One Planet concluded, rightly, with Africa. Poor old Europe… it was always going to be hard to contrast a wee squirrel batting away a vole or some such with polar bears leaping off cliffs to murder whales, but it’s been an ever-mesmerising delight, and Attenborough’s finally been allowed by the BBC to get his campaigning voice on, and his rigid arguments. At the meltingly tender age of 93.