Sky one

‘By the way, my name is Max. I take care of them, which ain’t easy, because their hobby is murder.’ Back in the early 1980s, when everything was lovelier, we were all so innocent that our idea of a brilliant and original new detective formula went like this: they’re sleuths — but they’re also rich and married! (Or, in the case of Magnum: he’s a sleuth — but he has a moustache and he lives on Hawaii! Or, with Bergerac: he’s a sleuth —but he lives on Jersey and is named after a region of France. Etc.) These days, we are a lot more jaded and knowing and series creators

Danny Brocklehurst, the scriptwriter for Sky One’s Brassic, used to work for Shameless in its glory days — although if you didn’t know that already you could probably guess. For a start, the central characters are another close-knit group of ducking-and-diving working-class northerners not overburdened with a social conscience. But there’s also the fact that, no matter what they get up to, they’re clearly supposed to be lovable — coupled with the rather more mysterious fact that they are. However dark the storylines theoretically become, the programme presents them with such an infectious swagger, and such a thorough blurring of realism and wild imagination, that the result is not merely

First shown on BBC Scotland, Harry Birrell Presents Films of Love and War (BBC4, Wednesday) was the documentary equivalent of a William Boyd novel, showing us a 20th-century life shaped by 20th-century history. The programme was made by Harry’s granddaughter Carina, who’d been eight when he died, and known him only as ‘a lovable, frail, blind old man’. But then she came across 400 carefully labelled reels of film in the family shed, together with an equally well-organised collection of diaries. Exactly — or even vaguely — when this discovery took place was one of many details that Carina tantalisingly failed to disclose. (Now and again, we did see her