The week in TV: The Nest; Belgravia; The English Game; Hitmen and more

The Nest (BBC1 One) | iPlayer
Belgravia (ITV) | ITV Hub
The English Game | Netflix
The Letter for the King | Netflix
Hitmen (Sky One)
Duncanville (Channel 4) | All 4
This Country (BBC Three/BBC One) | iPlayer

TV is changing, though not so Gonzales-speedily as other arts strands. Already, even before Monday’s lockdown, Sunday Brunch was cancelled and those on The Big Question had to sit far, far away, screaming downwind at each other, in a nice, Christian, God’s-morning sort of way, about fat-shaming. Holly and Phil on This Morning have been elevated to key-worker status, Lorraine Kelly has been granted the privilege of coupling with Piers Morgan for Good Morning Britain, and the soaps apparently have enough in the can to last until May, June at a push. I find myself even now giving a tooth-sucking “tchh” at recent dramas: all those bodies, in one place! But it’s autumn that will be the loser: all those potential belters of programmes scripted, cast, green-lit, even wrapped, but now unfinishable. We’ll be left with married, self-isolating bargees jostling with each other’s film crews through the waterways of Britain. Arguably not our greatest dilemma at the mo.

So I was most taken, despite some sniffy reviews, with The Nest, an under-hyped five-parter that already threatens to keep us glued to our sofas for the next few Sundays, as if we’ve the choice. Nicole Taylor is the writer behind the Bafta success Three Girls, and it shows: in this, she’s given us not just a twisty, whose-motive-is-it-anyway thriller but also, so far, a pointed exploration of the rights and wrongs of surrogacy. Of womb-ownership. Whether the rights of an exploited (or manipulative?) youngster from the wrong side of Glasgow’s tracks should trump those of a desperate (or selfish) perfect privileged wife. And whether needs and rights can ever come together to mutual beneficence.

Martin Compston – back to his native Scottish accent, and all is thus right with the world – plays Dan, a hard-headed yet decent enough property developer; Sophie Rundle is Emily, his (increasingly annoying) wife. Emily simperingly feeds their new, 18-year-old surrogate Kaya – acquired through not-quite-legal processes and certainly a hokey set of plot coincidences – superfoods, and pampers her beyond pass-agg. Kaya (hugely interesting newcomer Mirren Mack) is carrying Emma’s last-ever frozen egg.

So far, this carries tension, and menace, and is all-round good crunchy telly, although I wince at how all successful Glaswegians, architects or villains, are apparently vouchsafed the self-same lochside Grand Designs villa: the shores of Luss must be stiff with location scouts. Also: one big plot reveal at the end of episode two might try your ability to suspend disbelief.

Talking of sniffy reviews, what could any of the friends of Julian “Downton” Fellowes find to say about his new six-part Belgravia thing other than: “What can I say, Jules? You’ve done it again!”

If you ever lose track of any segment of the plot (unlikely), especially a segment you actually care about (even more unlikely), there’s always a Greek chorus of dowdy understair servants, even less appealing than the gaggle on Downton, to itch and bitch with helpful summaries of the “See, Mistress Suet, what with the king on ’is deathbed and the class system more fluid than any time since the Hindustrial Revolution began in 1761…” variety. But Tamsin Greig and Harriet Walter are enough – actually, more than enough – to save this from itself: despite the creaking exposition, any ding-dong between those two haughty, ageless visages, especially regarding their late children’s reputations, is enough to grip.

Fellowes is also behind The English Game, a Netflix trinket about the (heavily romanticised) origins of modern football. Here, Jules throws himself and his class-obsession firmly in with the oiks. Hence the Old Etonians are portrayed, almost to a man, as scheming, fouling, scornful, over-flannelled bastards. The brave northern mill town, which has imported two plucky Scots to change the face of the game – they’ve learned to pass, see, in Scotland – and let them grab glory in the FA Cup, are gritty, honest, snot-faced toilers and hewers. I was honestly expecting to see a bicycle-kick at one stage, in 1872, as the oiks thumped in another winner. Tommyrot, but watchable tommyrot.

The Letter for the King is a curious beast that might, just, take off, tying mid-teens to the screen for hours on end. It’s a fantasy, based on a 1962 Dutch novel. It has little of the exuberant invention of Harry Potter, little of the heft of Lord of the Rings, little of the darkness of Game of Thrones – but it instead is an amalgam, a youngish but moreish pretender to all of the above, and an actually rather terrific coming-of-age adventure.

Young Tiuri (Amir Wilson, last seen passing through from his real world into Lyra’s in His Dark Materials) is nicely judged as the lad waiting for his rebirth as a hero, tasked with carrying a world-saving letter-in-a-codex across the mountains. The show also features a wonderful Thaddea Graham, as his doughty, diminutive co-traveller, and adults such as Andy Serkis (and his real daughter, Ruby), Omid Djalili, Ben Chaplin and Kim Bodnia. I fervently wish it had been on when I was 13, or even 16.

Hitmen, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins’s first scripted comedy, has a dreadful premise: two gauche assassins, bitching and bonding in their van while various hooded bodies thrash about in handcuffs before meeting – or possibly not, dependent on whim – a canal-based doom. It could have been done very, very badly. It’s done pretty damned well: that chemistry, of course, but also many decent gags.

Channel 4’s new animated sitcom, Duncanville, also made me laugh pretty much throughout: it’s essentially The Simpsons, but co-created by that show’s Mike Scully alongside Amy Poehler, the genius behind Parks and Recreation. Many years ago, George HW Bush said American families needed to be “more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons”; nearly 30 years on, a compromise is being thrust on Papa Bush. Teenager Duncan’s smalltown family is undoubtedly less dysfunctional than Matt Groening’s creation, but the humour is as on-the-button. Charming, unthreatening: but absolutely no edge. Try it.

The best in homegrown humour, bar almost none, came to a wistful end. The second series of Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper’s This Country has delighted, angered, enthralled and baffled to an inordinate extent, and I’m heart-sorry to see it go. There’s a Kurtan and a Kerry living on in every misbegotten, under-endowed Cotswold and Chiltern village, every village in Britain, with their tiny horizons and their big, confused hearts. To have identified that well-intentioned, dumb, thrawn, glorious strata of society is the legacy of the Cooper twins. Also, a beautiful final in-joke.