The week in TV: Us; Criminal; Bake Off; Grayson Perry in America; Ghosts

Us (BBC One) | iPlayer
Criminal (Netflix) | Netflix
The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4) | All 4
Grayson Perry’s Big American Road Trip (Channel 4) | All 4
Ghosts (BBC One) | iPlayer

I was glad to see the adaptation of Us looming in my headlights a couple of weeks ago, because it gave me an excuse to order the book, and I’d quite forgotten how consistently smart and charming a writer is David Nicholls.

And Tom Hollander duly did everything in his power to bring to life, from the page, the complex character of Douglas Petersen, a biochemist probably in the wrong marriage for 20 years, and beset both by a controlling pedantry and a wonderfully dry wit. Naturally, he did so perfectly, and without ever seeming to really try. In this he was surely helped in that the adaptation was by someone called “David Nicholls”, the author here taking rather more care not to let his baby get away from him than he perhaps did with One Day, the 2011 film of another of his bestsellers that was bowdlerised and over-saccharined by Hollywood.

Related: David Nicholls: 'Gifting books feels like changing the music at someone else’s party'

Us is split, but never in a confusing manner, between the timelines of Douglas and Connie in the throes of breakup yet giving it one last gesture, one last summer, as they go on a grand tour with son Albie, and their earlier unlikely courtship. Thus it’s a treat both for fans of 90s nostalgia and for any of us, cursing coronavirus, who can just gaze at Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, and yearn for times lost (even as we mentally tut at the crowds, the touching).

It’s a strong cast – Saskia Reeves’s Connie just the right side of irritating, Tom Taylor splendid as truculent Albie, Iain De Caestecker a remarkable find as the young Douglas – but it is to buttoned-up Hollander our eyes, and I suspect sympathies, are drawn. Even when getting it wrong: at Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa in the Louvre, all he can muse on is what a bugger of a job it must have been to frame; and, unforgivably, he drags off Albie from a fight when the youngster is clearly in the right – a rather vital plot pivot. Yet still we feel for Douglas, a loving man who means best, confused – and a little jealous? – at the mother-son bond, his inability to understand either of them. And Hollander does this all with the softening of his eyes, a moue here, a shrug there, no words. It’s a remarkable watch, often funny, never schmaltzy.

More acting treats in the welcome second season of Criminal, four discrete tales revolving only around the police interview process. Once you get over the faintly loopy premise – a disparate batch of crims, accusers, witnesses are brought before a finely tuned little band of interviewers, most of whom will watch proceedings from behind a two-way mirror with a famously unexplained red neon surround; there will be no car chases; in fact it’s the perfect one-act play – there is high drama, and constant challenging of our prejudices.

The permanent team is strong, Rochenda Sandall and Lee Ingleby in particular, but it is the guest stars in this series who hog the screen in every sense. Sophie Okonedo, Kit Harington (significantly sleazier than we ever saw in Thrones), Sharon Horgan, Kunal Nayyar. Netflix has a growing reputation for things that you get through 10 episodes of and then wonder why you bothered, but this is not one.

Bake Off returned in slightly kinder, less snarky mode than last year’s graceless journey, and was every bit as warming, as charming, as wired-to-the-moon daft as the old show we know and love. Contestants nicely picked, a delightful mixed bag of the driven and the scatty and the doomed, and some bonds had been made after all were locked down for six weeks together, though I’m not sure I would have smiled such a forgiving smile as did Dave after eight of my pineapple upside-downs were sent flying by a klutzy arm.

This was remarkable too for the oddest showstopper challenge yet seen. Not just in the execution but even in the conception: the head of a famous personal hero. The eventual choices were even more surreal. Attenborough, Freddie Mercury, I get, yet… I love Bill Bryson, both the person and writing, but “personal celebrity hero”, even in lemon madeira? The lead singer (mint and strawberry) of Blink-182?

My one problem, which I must try to get over, is the sudden presence of Matt Lucas as Sandi Toksvig’s replacement. I have had a (doubtless irrational) antipathy to the man since the execrable Little Britain; and here, although he was trying hard, and being kind and eager, his inexplicable ascension to near-treasured status just mystifies.

Still on Channel 4, Grayson Perry was the best host we have yet had for that TV trope of “white people trying to get to the heart of culture wars in Trump’s America”. Unfailingly clever, he’s unafraid to let the silences draw out, feels not the need to fill them with gabble, then stings with the most pertinent question, often about the elephant in the room.

In this first fascinating outing (of three) he was trying to get to grips with race. Meeting the relatively privileged African Americans of Atlanta, Georgia, the “capital of black America”, and hearing about the culture war in a more optimistic context. Then meeting the poorer, and doubly dispossessed, black women there, trying quietly to understand their point about white privilege. Up shortly to Washington, where he engaged with the pillars of DC’s “historical black elite”, where class is all, colour negligible.

His conclusions were refreshing. Throughout that first trip, talking mainly to black people, he was never once made to feel awkward: “There’s a generosity. Because they want to have the conversation about racism. Because they have to think about it every day of their lives.” A toweringly sane series, which I don’t think suffers more than a squit by being filmed before this summer’s BLM protests.

Ghosts is back, and in even better form. This confection by the Horrible Histories team, but aimed firmly at an adult audience, with its tongue firmly in its cheek, is a dizzying – I dislike the word romp, but sadly there’s no other – through the tale of one couple, one haunted castle, and their attempts to zhuzh it up as a prestige wedding venue despite the pesky presence of headless poets etc. Yup, I just used the words zhuzh, romp, prestige and pesky, and it says much about the quality that this caused me no pain. Sharp and smart, fast and fun, and horribly watchable.