TV picks of the week

Published on 26/08/2012 00:00

What to watch this week

BEST CRIME

Good Cop

BBC1, Thursday, 9pm

Plaintive piano, wailing strings, a heartbeat building into techno, slammed doors... if all of this sounds familiar, indeed sounds Danish, then that’s because the one-off thriller is directed by Birger Larsen from The Killing. It’s got more to recommend it, including Karla Crome (Misfits, Hit & Miss), who plays the sister of a young woman murdered in a grubby Nottingham flat. Erin and Coleen had gone to a local pub. “We were playing pool, he came over, said: ‘Don’t worry, I’m a priest.’ She thought it was funny,” 
recalls Coleen. “He said: 
‘The drinks were for two 
nuns but they haven’t turned up.’ ” Stefan, talking to another camera in a prison jumpsuit, has a different story. “My mum warned me about Nottingham – always grief. She said: ‘It’s there right at the start of the name: ‘Not.’ ” Well, somebody’s lying.

BEST COMEDY

Bad Sugar

Channel 4, Sunday, 10pm

In this reduced era of four-parters instead of six, it can seem as if only two actors are in regular work: Stephen Graham (see Best Crime) and Olivia Colman. She appears in so many serious roles (last week, Accused) that I wonder if there’s an entire audience which is unaware she also works often, and brilliantly, in comedy. This is a spoof melodrama about a mining dynasty.

BEST CRIME

Good Cop

BBC1, Thursday, 9pm

Most recently seen 
picking up a transvestite (Accused) and as a 
rather effete Scotsman (Parade’s End, see above), Stephen Graham gets 
back to being plain old terrifying in this new series about a Merseyside cop (Warren Brown) who riles a local gangster and is then forced to look on helplessly when a fellow officer pays a terrible price.