Television choices: The cast are all right in James Corden's comedy The Wrong Mans
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Your support makes all the difference.TV pick of the week: The Wrong Mans
Tuesday 9pm BBC2
This new comedy drama written by and starring James Corden and Horrible Histories' Mathew Baynton is quite good. What's remarkable is the wealth of on-screen talent involved, and I don't just mean Dawn French, Rebecca Front, Nick Moran, Homeland's David Harewood and Him & Her's Sarah Solemani. When you can employ Paul Higgins (The Thick of It) and Twenty Twelve's Vincent Franklin in the seemingly throwaway roles of traffic cops, then that is casting in depth. Taking its title from Hitchcock's 1956 thriller of mistaken identity, The Wrong Man, it stars Baynton as a Berkshire County Council office drudge accidentally mixed up in a criminal conspiracy. Corden is on his best form as his excitable colleague.
The Making of Merkel with Andrew Marr
Saturday 8pm BBC2
On the eve of the most important German federal elections in decades, Andrew Marr examines the life and career of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Marr investigates her formative years in East Germany and how her journey has been marked by caution and compromise, with occasional flashes of ruthlessness.
Downton Abbey
Sunday 9pm ITV
ITV's flagship drama returns with Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) very fetching in her black widow's weeds, but the promise of no new deaths as the household meets the music and fashions of the Jazz Age. And as Lady Edith embraces the Bloomsbury set, there's even a cameo from Virginia Woolf, and the stunt casting of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa as Dame Nellie Melba.
Sex: My British Job
Monday 10pm channel 4
Donning glasses containing a hidden camera, journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai goes undercover as a housekeeper in London brothels. Her main interest is the vast number of illegal immigrants servicing the British sex industry, such as the fellow Taiwanese woman forced to have unprotected sex because it pays more and she owes £20,000 for being smuggled into the UK.
Meet the Russians
Wednesday 9pm Fox
More than 300,000 Russians now live in Britain, according to this new documentary series, with one in 10 London homes priced at £2 or more being bought by Russians such as Marinica, who says, "I love my country but it is dangerous." For the photographer Dmitry, the danger comes from the fact that he is gay, and Soho is more tolerant than the streets of St Petersburg.
Sound of Cinema: the Music That Made the Movies
Thursday 9pm BBC4
Peaky Blinders is not the first costume drama to employ contemporary music, and Vangelis talks Neil Brand through his synthesiser score for 1981's Chariots of Fire. Brand also tries his hand at playing a theremin, the experimental instrument that Miklos Rozsa used to evoke a sense of psychological disturbance in Hitchcock's movies.
The IT Crowd: the Final Episode
Friday 9pm Channel 4
A one-off episode reuniting Chris O'Dowd, Richard Ayoade, Katherine Parkinson and Matt Berry in Graham Linehan's sitcom. As Moss (Ayoade) discovers the secrets of self-confidence, Roy, Jen and Reynholm Industries are put at risk when an incident involving spilt coffee and a homeless person ends up on the internet.
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