TV preview: Count Arthur Strong (BBC1, Friday, 9pm): he's becoming too likeable but still a great character

Like me, you may have mixed feelings about the arrival of the third TV series of Count Arthur Strong to what he would call “the BBBC”. On the one hand, any Count Arthur is better than no Count Arthur. On the other hand, there is something very annoying, baffling and disappointing about how badly the genius of Count Arthur on (BBBC) Radio 4 just goes so flat on the telly.

Partly it’s the loss of his northern chums such as Alf the Quality Butcher. The brilliant Rory Kinnear, once again deployed as comic foil to Arthur, just adds too much pleasantness to the mix, and they have tried to make Arthur nicer and kinder than we all know him to be. Check out his memoirs, Through It All I’ve Always Laughed, published, in the Count’s words, by Faber and Faber and Faber, to see what I mean. The greatest comedy creations are people you’d never really want to spend much time with – Alan Partridge, David Brent, Brian Potter, Nigel Farage – and Arthur is becoming way too likeable. Mean and manipulative is how we like him.

Still, the better news for the body of Count Arthur’s devotees, in which count myself a devout member, is that the writing and acting are much improved on the first two TV runs, so thanks to scriptwriter Graham Linehan and Steve Delaney, the progenitor of the phenomenononon. The first episode revolves around a séance, and I loved the description of the effects of excessive Crème de mMenthe consumption as “minty oblivion”. I just wished there was more of that. The witty writing, I mean, not the Crème de menthe, seeing as you’re not asking.

Impossible to ignore, though some of us do try, is the Eurovision Song Contest, the grand finale of which is on tonight. I really don’t, do I, need to add anything about this strange ritual of high camp and low geopolitics. Russia is banned this year, by the way, and Graham Norton takes on the task of compering this orgy. Not a great way to spend a summer’s evening, even with the weather we’ve been having.

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Also impossible to get away from is the general election, and the first of the “leaders’ debates” is being launched by ITV on Thursday evening. They don’t claim that Theresa May will take part, nor anyone else so far as I can see, so Julie Ethchingham may end up feeling a bit lonely. I am available, if called upon, to substitute for any or all of them, seeing as I have learned all the soundbites now.

Also on Thursday, I’m intrigued by Kat and Alfie: Redwater. Soap spin-offs used to a lot more common than nowadays, and this outgrowth of the EastEnders franchise looks promising. Jessie Wallace and Shane Ritchie, who always lifted the dramatic tension in the Queen Vic, find themselves transposed from fictional Walford to real County Waterford, so it’s an un-soapy, unclaustrophobic sort of production, and a storyline about a long-lost son adds the necessary emotional stress.

Finally and following the BBC’s superb retelling of the Shannon Matthews abduction in Moorside, is the second and final episode of another near-contemporary drama, this time on the Rochdale child grooming scandal. Three Girls is tough to watch, but it’s right to keep the victims in mind, and, thus the lessons that need to be learned about what went so wrong. Grooming and child sexual abuse, we should be clear, has not gone away.