Aidan Smith's TV week: This Town (BBC1), Ripley (Netflix), Mammals (BBC1)

Steven Knight’s wonderful This Town has an issue-packed plot, Downton’s Lady Mary as a junkie and lots of music

Levi Brown as Dante Williams, the duffle-coated poet of This Town. Picture: Robert Viglasky/BBC

Two lads on a flyover late at night as the M6 roars beneath them, cousins reflecting on a funeral where there was singing and also fighting. “What a family we are, eh?” says one to the other. And what a drama This Town (BBC1, ****) is.

After Peaky Blinders it’s Steven Knight’s latest Midlands epic. Singing features a lot in the opening double-bill and something tells me we haven’t seen the last of the fighting. Possibly here I’m remembering the moment - chiming gruesomely with recent Russian state torture - where some poor schmuck is forced at gunpoint to chew on a chopped-off finger.

The action - the very actiony action - opens in 1981 with Birmingham in tumult, petrol-bombs flying and police batons smashing skulls with Dante - duffel-coated football prospect who’s lovestruck and dreams of becoming a poet - caught up in the rioting. He’s a writer, not a fighter, though he’ll prove himself useful at the latter, too.

Andrew Scott is moody and magnificent in black and white as Tom Ripley in Ripley. Picture: Nexflix

His cousin is Bardon, a trophy-winning dancer in his spare time who’s studying hard at college but whose father’s ambitions for him are as a junior member of the “’RA” - the IRA - beginning with a scam involving the removal of red dye from subsidised diesel sold to farms, the fuel then cleaned and flogged at normal price to buy guns.

And then there’s Dante’s “gorgeous, rock-hard big brother” Gregory, a squaddie on the front line of the Troubles, jumping out of his armoured vehicle on Belfast’s Falls Road and shouting: “This whole war, this whole thing - it’s about music. Why don’t you all just sing together?”

At moments like these - also when Bardon tries to drown out his father’s rendition of “The Fields of Athenry” with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” - This Town threatens to go a bit high-school musical. But it quickly re-sets thanks to the dark themes and winning performances of Ben Rose (Bardon), Levi Brown (Dante) and Jordan Bolger (Gregory).

“You Can’t Always Get … ” is the Rolling Stones but Bardon sings UB40’s reggae version. Ska beats are also heavy on the soundtrack - the drama’s title, of course, coming from The Specials’ “Ghost Town”. Dante meets Jeannie who tells him: “You look like somebody who could be a somebody, even on our estate.” (Brum’s Bronx, you’ll find it by heading for the plumes of smoke). Dante puts his words to Jeannie’s music and all they need is a vocalist but Bardon, who’s been marked down for the gig, is hitchhiking to London to escape being recruited by the old man.

The tiny fennec fox uses its ginormous ears to detect dinner hiding underground. Picture: Bruno D'Amicis/BBC

Dante after thrashing some skinheads seems set to be recruited by the clubland gangster who offers up finger food. And then there’s Gregory who the Army want to sign up to spy on his clan. I’m loving the triumvirate’s scenes together, though don’t know how many more of them there will be. I didn’t think I was going to love Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary as a junkie living in “a bucket by the motorway” but, as unlikely as the role seems for her, and as porcelain as her skin remains, Michelle Dockery wins me round. And if that’s really her singing at the funeral she’s sensational.

Now, who wants to see the Hot Priest’s bottom? I know, I know - objectification. But maybe Steven Zaillian, writer-director of Ripley (***), reckoned more of Andrew Scott would be needed because a Netflix audience doesn’t always have the patience for artiness, slowness, quietness - and what’s more monochrome.

It’s certainly gorgeous (the production, that is - I’m not Colin Paterson, the BBC’s entertainment correspondent, who got unnecessarily fruity with Scott at the Baftas). In black and white even a grotty, early 1960s New York apartment is luminous. Everyday objects reveal texture and sparkle. Zaillian shoots from unusual angles, exaggerating shadows and falling rain in the classic film noir tradition.

This is a new take on Patricia Highsmith’s psychological thriller with Scott as grifter Tom Ripley who’s none too successful at mail fraud, therefore when he’s offered a safe, well-paid gig which gets him out of town for a while he jumps at it. So we leave New York - an eerily empty Big Apple - for … hang on, I recognise this place, carved into the vertiginous cliffs of Italy’s Amalfi Coast: it’s Atrani, the plainer sister to next-door glamourpuss Amalfi itself, and scene of a holiday 20-odd summers ago, languid, lazy days rounded off at sunset with limoncello, endlessly reciting an entire cassette’s worth of Harry Hill gags.

And Ripley does not locate the secret Atrani funfair either. His days are languid and lazy too as he tracks down the dilettante son of a rich businessman who wants him home. This fellow, Dickie (Johnny Flynn), lives at the top of a thousand-odd steps and I swear we see Ripley trudge up and down every one.

Dickie’s trying to be an artist, isn’t very good, nothing like Zaillian who composes every shot in painstakingly painterly fashion. Ripley slithers into Dickie’s life, pushing out his friend Marge (Dakota Fanning). Homoerotic tension builds, but in the length of time it takes Matt Damon as Ripley in the 1999 film to do a terrible thing, this version only reaches the point where the charming psychopath is caught trying on Dickie’s clothes. Scott is compelling, although I find myself reaching for the limoncello which isn’t there, longing for a Harry joke (the one about the Eric Clapton Detector Van was always a favourite).

We stay mainly monorchrome for Sir David Attenborough’s Mammals (BBC1, ****). This isn’t an old dawn-of-TV show featuring the great man whispering from the long grass; instead he’s in a screening room adding words to the stunning footage of the various species which come alive at night or thrive underground, beginning with a leopard, eyes piercingly white, as it chases baboons across treetops in Zambia.

The fennec fox’s ears are ridiculous but enable it to hear tasty gerbils under the Saharan sands. There’s sex - large hairy armadillos bonking in Argentina - and death as 60 spotted hyenas gang up on a cape buffalo in Tanzania. The Damaraland mole-rat of the Kalahari has massive buck teeth reminiscent of Deputy Dawg’s sidekick Vincent Van Gopher while Attenborough keeps the old cartoon references coming with a Wile E. Coyote quip. This crafty character is 4,000-strong while downtown Chicago sleeps, ensuring that some bunnies don’t make it all the way to Easter.

Attenborough’s soon-to-be 98-year-old eyes may not be as striking as those of the jaguar but they’re still full of boyish wonder. I always say this but treasure these programmes. You don’t know how many are left.