TV Week: A Spy Among Friends (STV), The Afterparty (Apple TV), Joe Swash: Teens in Care (BBC1)

The summer holidays are traditionally a fallow time for quality programming, as television executives focus more on Mediterranian beaches than schedules, but there are still some gems out there if you look hard enough, finds David Hepburn.

Back in the (occasionally) good old days, when there were only a handful of channels and a single remote control, it was relatively easy to plan your viewing schedule with the quickest glance at the television listings. That’s all changed with the introduction of a bewildering array of streaming and subscription services, with new platforms popping up on a monthly basis (do I need Paramount+ in my life?). It means that it’s increasingly easy to miss must-watch shows. A case in point is A Spy Amongst Friends (STV), which has languished on the hard-to-navigate waters of ITVX for several months, only now surfacing on terrestrial television for a much-deserved Sunday evening slot.

The true life spy drama is based on a book by bestselling author Ben Macintyre who specialises in taking small chunks of lesser-known history, sprinkling them with a little artistic license, and producing ripping yarns that prove fact is often stranger than fiction. ‘Operation Mincemeat’ recently got the Hollywood treatment and now another of his novels is moving from the page to the small screen.

This time he’s tackling the twisty story of Kim Philby, the British Intelligence Officer who in 1963 was revealed to be a double agent working for the Soviet Union. He’s played by erstwhile Neighbours actor and subsequent Hollywood star Guy Pearce with the stiffest of upper lips. “Can you furnish us with a couple of pink gins?”, he enquires of a quivering waiter seconds after a bomb crashes through the ceiling of the private members’ club he’s blagged his way into. It’s at this club that he meets fellow spook Nicholas Elliott, with much of the rest of the plot focused through the prism of their relationship. It will come as a relief to anybody who saw Damien Lewis’ recent musical stylings at the British Grand Prix, grunting out the National Anthem in front of an assembled grid of confused F1 drivers, that he’s back to the day job here as Elliot, providing the perfect acting foil to Pearce.

Damien Lewis and Guy Pearce in A Spy Among Friends

Much of the action takes place via a series of conversations in darkened rooms, all of which are beautifully written, slowly building up the viewers’ understanding of the characters’ myriad of motivations. Philby and Elliot speak in a hotel room in Beirut, an exchange which is then discussed by Elliot and the MI5 agent (played by the wonderful Anna Maxwell Martin) investigating his role in Philby’s subsequent defection. Meanwhile, way out east, Philby and his suspicious spymaster lock horns on his arrival in the Sovet Union. It’s a world of Cold War espionage in which nobody should be – or is – trusted, and where your best friend may be your greatest enemy.

This is prestige television at its most complex, where every line could be of utmost importance, so it’s not one to watch while fiddling with your phone, glancing over the newspapers or contemplating a nap. Give it the required concentration though, and it will reward you with the slow reveal of its many puzzle-box secrets in the coming weeks.

Trust is also an issue in the second season of ingenious murder mystery comedy The Afterparty (Apple TV), which once again opens with the discovery of a body, before each episode looks at the hours leading up to the murder from a different character’s perspective. Like ‘The White Lotus’ before it, this solves the problem of how to follow a successful, but self-contained, series by taking a few surviving characters and transplanting them into a different story on a similar theme. Police Detective Dammer (Tiffany Haddish), now a budding crime author after solving the season one murder, is back to try and identify who killed the groom on his wedding night. Also returning are season one couple Zoe (Zoe Chao) and Aniq (Sam Richardson), whose recollections make up the first episode.

The strength of the series, and the source of much of the comedy, is the selection of weird and wonderful wedding guests. Standouts this time around include a typically-angry Ken Jeong as the father of the bride, British standup Jack Whitehall’s surprisingly effective turn as the slick best man, and Silicon Valley's Zach Woods as the lizard-loving murder victim. The jokes come thick and fast, and it’s impossible not to get drawn in to trying to work out whodunnit yourself.

Sam Richardson and Zoe Chao are two of only three cast members to return in the second season of The Afterparty.

It’s said everybody has a book in them, and the same is seemingly now true of reality television stars and documentaries. From ‘Made in Chelsea’ favourite Spencer Matthews’ attempt to locate his mountaineer brother’s body on Mount Everest in ‘Finding Michael’, to ‘The Only Way Is Essex’ regular Olivia Attwood looking at online sex work in ‘Getting Filthy Rich’, there are no shortage of hot topics being taken on by a vaguely famous face you can’t quite place.

This week it’s ‘I’m a Celebrity' champion Joe Swash’s turn to get serious in Joe Swash: Teens in Care (BBC One). It’s easy to be sniffy about this sort of programme, with the suspicion that viewer figures rather than documentary making prowess is behind the successful commission, but former Eastender Swash deals with the subject with compassion and a lightness of touch that puts many more experienced filmmakers to shame. His entry point into the topic is the foster child taken in by his mother who he now considers a brother, and it’s quickly apparent just how much he cares about the “lost generation of kids we need to look after”. He swiftly builds up rapport chatting to both youngsters and carers, their often tragic stories laying bare just how broken the system is. Sadly the interview with Claire Coutinho, the current Minister for Children, offers only the merest glimpse of hope that anything will change.