What to watch on TV this week: 26th April - 2nd May

There are also plenty of other unscripted shows on the schedule for this week, including the return of makeup reality series Glow Up: Britain’s Next Make-Up Star and comedy competition show Taskmaster, as well as documentaries Martin Clunes: Islands of the Atlantic and Louis Theroux: The Settlers.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for scripted fare, new drama Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is coming to Disney+, while comedy fans can look forward to The Four Seasons on Netflix.

Here, you'll find our top picks for this week – read on for our full choice of what to watch.

Doctor Who: The Well

Release date: Saturday 26th April, 7:20pm, BBC One

Christopher Chung makes the switch from Slow Horses to time and space this evening — and he’s not the only cast member from the Apple TV+ spy drama to be doing so, as Kadiff Kirwan and Freddie Fox will also be making guest appearances later this season. Here, though, Chung is playing a high-ranking trooper by the name of Cassio Palin-Paleen, who’s part of a platoon on a forbidding planet investigating radio silence from a mining operation.

In the mix, too, is star of the moment Rose Ayling-Ellis, who features as the enigmatic Aliss, a character not originally conceived as deaf but who now brings with her a hologram device that projects subtitles of the spoken speech from those in the vicinity.

David Brown

The Assembly

Release date: Saturday 26th April, 10:05pm, ITV1

This is wonderful. It’s not hard to imagine future historians dividing celebrity interviews into two eras: before and after The Assembly. The premise is simple: a Q&A, but instead of one interviewer there are dozens, and instead of media pros it’s a group of people with autism, neurodivergence and learning disabilities, so the usual rules go out the window.

You may have seen a one-off on BBC One last year with Michael Sheen (and if you haven’t, do seek it out on iPlayer). Now on ITV1, Danny Dyer is the first to brave a process where the questions fired at him range from the cheeky (“Do you want to fight me?”) to the profound (“How was therapy?”).

Fatherhood, anxiety and being a sex symbol are all discussed — as is how much he got paid for The Wall (“Maybe £100,000”). But it’s the unpredictable turns the show takes that mark it out. Halfway through, Dyer goes off on a tangent about the power of meditation and promptly leads the group in a meditation session there and then. It’s extraordinary.

David Butcher

Louis Theroux: The Settlers

Release date: Sunday 27th April, 9pm, BBC Two

A new documentary from Louis Theroux feels like an event, and all the more so when it takes us to the heart of a global flashpoint. He and his crew visit the occupied West Bank – Palestinian territory, according to international law, but subject to the Israeli military, and increasingly an area where outposts settled by Jews encroach on Palestinian farms and suburbs.

Even putting it in those terms, as Louis does, sparks a hardline response from the Jewish settlers he meets, who maintain the land has been theirs since Biblical times. Or as one puts it crudely, “We were in this land planting vineyards before Mohammed was in the third grade.”

Louis interviews radical settler leader Daniella Weiss, who smilingly promotes the dream of a Jewish Gaza. He hears a rabbi call Arabs savages and say, “All of Gaza, all of Lebanon should be cleansed of these camel riders.” It’s sad and chilling, with Louis’s weary humanity (he filmed here once before in 2010) ground down by what he sees, and what the future may hold.

David Butcher

Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes

Release date: Wednesday 30th April, Disney Plus

This is precisely the type of drama that would reliably air on Sundays at 9pm on ITV1: a four-part series depicting a real-life tale of injustice, written by Jeff Pope, and starring Conleth Hill, Russell Tovey and Emily Mortimer. Rather than terrestrial broadcasters, increasingly it’s streamers where these very British stories (see also: Toxic Town and Adolescence) are finding a home.

Like millions of other Londoners in the wake of the 7/7 terrorist attacks, electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was making his way to work when he was shot and killed by Met police officers. The catalogue of failings and incompetence that led up to the events of 22nd July 2005 were covered brilliantly by a BBC2 documentary on the bombings. Here, they are pored over efficiently, and often unflinchingly.

It’s startling how quickly fiction became fact following the tragedy, and how twenty years on, many of these inaccuracies still percolate. Hopefully, this will go a long way to definitively righting those wrongs.

Frances Taylor

Glow Up: Britain’s Next Make-Up Star season 7

Release date: Wednesday 30th April, 8pm, BBC Three

Supermodel and host Leomie Anderson returns with series judges Val Garland and Dominic Skinner, as ten new aspiring make-up artists compete to create astonishing make-up. The stakes are immediately high as they must create runway looks for iconic fashion designer Harri, the man behind Sam Smith’s latex get-up at the 2023 Brit Awards – so he’ll definitely want something “out there”.

Next, pioneering influencer Patricia Bright issues the creative brief of generating a mind-blowing and unforgettable look inspired by the make-up artists’ most influential characteristic. One of them rustles up a swamp creature with parasitic worms escaping every orifice (yes, really), which surely fits the brief, but is it enough to avoid the dreaded Face Off elimination?

Kay Ribiero

Genius Game

Release date: Wednesday 30th April, 9pm, ITV1

Let’s play Numberwang! I mean, Genius Game! This comically convoluted game of strategy attempts to tap into The Traitors zeitgeist as players take on a series of challenges – the key to which involves forming alliances and outsmarting fellow contenders – while David Tennant presides via a room that resembles the TARDIS.

And it appears as though he’s got stuck somewhere in space and time, unable to find his way to the TV studio. As “the Creator”, he’s an omnipresent voice relaying all-purpose recorded instructions and quips, which is both odd, and, I’d imagine, easy to license for international versions (cynical? Moi?). If deciphering overly complicated board games or escape rooms is your thing, there’s fun to be had getting to grips with the Tokens of Life, Garnets and Death Matches. For everyone else, it’s a schlep. The quests continue tomorrow at 9pm.

Frances Taylor

Taskmaster season 19

Release date: Thursday 1st May, 9pm, Channel 4

After nearly a decade on TV, you might think Taskmaster would be running out of comedians. But here we are at series 19, and they’ve still managed to find some victims — sorry, contestants — willing to submit themselves to the strange, unrealistic demands of Greg Davies and Alex Horne, which this week include balancing vinegar and recreating filmed footage backwards.

This series’s line-up includes Ghosts’ Mathew Baynton, podcaster Rosie Ramsey plus up-and-coming stand-ups Fatiha El-Ghorri and Stevie Martin. And interestingly, in the slot usually reserved for an established older UK comedian (think Frank Skinner, Julian Clary or Jenny Éclair in previous years), they’ve brought in US comedian Jason Mantzoukas.

In Hollywood, he acts in sitcoms like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place or action movies like Keanu Reeves’s John Wick 3. Here, he’s throwing vegetables around to try and medal in the ‘Pealympics’. Time will tell if he regrets boarding his flight.

Huw Fullerton

The Four Seasons

Release date: Thursday 1st May, Netflix

Alan Alda's 1981 movie becomes a series, the remake being a fairly faithful one with a writing team and cast led by Tina Fey. Three couples, including a group who have been friends since college, take weekend breaks and holidays together, meeting up in spring, summer, autumn and winter, with two episodes dedicated to each trip - but at the spring getaway, one of the men rocks his friends by confiding that he intends to divorce his other half.

As the other two couples inevitably re-assess their own relationships, the portrait of life in your late 40s/early 50s - when both your partner's character flaws and your own have become pronounced and unlikely to change - leads to many uncomfortable moments but plenty of belly laughs too. The core of the gang, played by Fey, Will Forte, Steve Carell and Colman Domingo, are believable as honest, funny best friends.

Jack Seale

Martin Clunes: Islands of the Atlantic

Release date: Friday 2nd May, 9pm, ITV1

Following on from his jolly – and often squiffy – series travelling around France with his mate Neil Morrissey, Martin Clunes gets a bit more serious by exploring some of the lesser-known islands in the Atlantic Ocean.

He starts 150 miles west of Africa on São Tomé and Príncipe, which I, for one, knew nothing about. This tiny island country was colonised by the Portuguese in the 15th century and endured a dark period of slavery on its sugar and cacao plantations. Now its traditions are woven into everyday life: Clunes learns (with characteristic enthusiasm and a big grin) about both palm and cashew wine, the theatrical dance performance that is tchiloli, and how the women on Príncipe make all the big decisions.

He also gets quite soppy when he helps with the controlled release of some green turtle hatchlings. And who would have guessed that he’d be a dab hand at grinding old beer bottles into sand to be turned into glass beads for jewellery at a woman’s co-operative?

Jane Rackham

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