What to watch on TV this week: 29th November - 5th December

As we head into the final month of the year, it's a big week for unscripted shows, whether they be hard-hitting documentaries or fun-filled reality shows.

Documentaries including What's the Monarchy For? and Tommy: The Good. The Bad. The Fury season 2 are both on the schedule, as is a companion piece to the factual drama Prisoner 951, called Prisoner 951: The Hostages' Story.

Meanwhile, on the reality side, Sara Cox hosts new daytime show The Marvellous Miniature Workshop and high-end property series Owning Manhattan is back for season 2 on Netflix.

However, that's not all - there are still a number of big scripted offerings lined up for this week, including the second season of BBC sitcom Mammoth, starry new Netflix Western series The Abandons and hard-hitting drama Say Nothing, which tells the story of The Troubles in Northern Ireland and is coming to Channel 4, having originally been released on Disney Plus.

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

The Marvellous Miniature Workshop

Release date: Monday 1st December, 2pm, BBC One

Small is beautiful: that’s the message of a sweet new show hosted by Sara Cox. Your heart will be warmed and your eyes dampened as the craft of miniature modelmaking reaches into the past and brings it back to tiny teeny life.

The idea is simple: crafts-folk recreate places, people and life moments via ingenious little models. For the first episode, retired social worker Leah recalls how much a now-derelict public library in Manchester meant to her as a child. Modelmaker Hannah sets about recreating the old reading room — its parquet flooring, stained glass window, rumpled newspapers and, amazingly, 3,000 micro-books for its shelves. The precision and skill are astonishing. If this doesn’t bring back happy memories for Leah, nothing will… Continues daily, until Thursday.

David Butcher

Say Nothing

Release date: Monday 1st December, 9pm, Channel 4

When it was shown on Disney+ a year ago, this ambitious drama inevitably attracted debate and controversy with its effort to avoid moral absolutes in a depiction of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It opens in Belfast in 1972, with the shocking abduction of Jean McConville (Judith Roddy), a widowed mother of 10 who is snatched from her home, in front of her children, by masked gunmen. McConville, whom the IRA suspected of passing information to the British Army, was never returned to her family; her remains were finally found in 2003. The early 21st Century is also where we meet Dolours Price, who was an active IRA volunteer in 1972 and is now contributing to an oral history of the Troubles.

With Maxine Peake and Lola Petticrew both excellent as the older and younger versions of Price, the series explores the human cost of the conflict, and the power of political convictions that are so strongly held they obscure everything else in the lives of individuals, but which don’t always survive the passage of time: while we cannot help but sympathise with the younger Delours, the elder woman’s recollections are tinged with regret.

Jack Seale

Mammoth season 2

Release date: Monday 1st December, 10pm, BBC Two

Season 2 finds glacier-preserved 1970s PE teacher Tony Mammoth (Mike Bubbins) still finding his feet in the 21st century. After a stressful clash with modern technology sends him into a faint, a doctor suggests some lifestyle changes — but Mammoth’s of the opinion that if a ton of ice couldn’t kill him, his usual 30 pints a week won’t do it, either. The success of this show rests on the performance of creator/star Bubbins, and in Tony Mammoth he has created a brilliant sitcom character; an awful man with an unbeatable comedy charisma. And, with co-writer Paul Doolan, Bubbins wisely gives himself all the best lines.

Huw Fullerton

What’s the Monarchy for?

Release date: Tuesday 2nd December, 9pm, BBC One

The title asks what a king or queen is for, but we might also ask – what are royal documentaries like this for? Channel 5 has a deep shelf of programmes to track each cough and spit of every royal storyline, and it does very well out of them. But this is seasoned veteran David Dimbleby offering more of an expansive essay on a subject he knows better than most.

He interviews former courtiers and cabinet ministers on what the limits of royal power are or should be, but he doesn’t look as if he believes any of them. He just fixes them with a patrician glare as if they were young whippersnappers trying to pull the wool over his eyes. The gravitas is dented when author Ash Sarkar teases Dimbleby that with his surname he should know all about the hereditary principle…

The episode ranges around, exploring the letters that King Charles used to write to ministers when he was “a meddlesome prince”; the 2019 prorogation of parliament; and whether a monarch’s real purpose is soft power – and endless small talk.

David Butcher

Tommy: The Good. The Bad. The Fury season 2

Release date: Tuesday 2nd December, 9pm, BBC Three

We’re back in the world of Tommy Fury, boxer, influencer and brother of Tyson. His rehabilitation from a damaged hand is hampered by the need to rest – not something that always comes comfortably to a recovering alcoholic, so long-suffering manager Jake tries to keep him busy with trips to Marbella (to meet and learn from bodybuilding legend Dorian Yates), the farm (to hang out with his adorable daughter Bambi) and to Bovingdon Airfield (where Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel is filmed). Fury is as frank as ever – “I just wing everything,” he admits while confessing he has no idea what The Wheel is, minutes before filming starts – and the insights into life on the fringes of boxing and celebrity are candid and sometimes inadvertently revealing.

Gabriel Tate

Prisoner 951: The Hostages' Story

Release date: Wednesday 3rd December, 9pm, BBC Two

British Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held hostage for six years by the Iranian government, supposedly on spying charges but really because of a decades-old military debt owed to them by the British government. Shockingly, this wasn’t unusual and people are still being used as political pawns. We hear from other British dual nationals: Anoosheh Ashoori, also released after the tanks debt was paid; Jason Rezaian, an American reporter, who was released when international sanctions were lifted against the country and a US debt was paid; and academic Kylie Moore Gilbert released in a prisoner exchange. Moore Gilbert says Iran arrests foreigners on spurious charges to leverage a diplomatic advantage – they use hostage-taking as a business model. They all agree with Ashoori when he explains “the wounds … never go away.”

The personal stories are horrendous and heart-breaking, but we also hear from Foreign Office officials at the time – including Jeremy Hunt but not Boris Johnson – and hear more about the complicated behind-the scenes issues of diplomacy. However, it doesn’t take away from the disgust and anger you will feel about this inhumane situation.

Jane Rackham

The Abandons

Release date: Thursday 4th December, Netflix

Created by Kurt Sutter, the writer behind Sons of Anarchy and Mayans MC - although Sutter left the project just before the end of shooting season 1 - a gruff drama tells a tale of two matriarchs at war in the semi-lawless flux of the American Northwest in the 1850s. Gillian Anderson is icy villain Constance Van Ness, whose plan to buy up an entire valley meets two obstacles: her spoiled grown-up children don't help her already negative reputation in the local community, but her chief adversary is Fiona Nolan (Lena Headey), the Irish leader of an adopted family. When Nolan and her neighbours refuse to buckle in the face of threats, intimidation and violence, an old-fashioned tussle between right and wrong breaks out, with some blurring of the moral boundaries and of loyalties as a final showdown looms.

Jack Seale

Owning Manhattan season 2

Release date: Friday 5th December, Netflix

Roughly a New York version of Selling Sunset, this property reality doc has less focus on its ultra-competitive team of realtors - although they are extremely competitive with each other, regularly hurling accusations of betrayal and incompetence as they tussle over multi-million-dollar sales - and more on the boss of the outfit. In season two, the charismatic but somehow faintly disturbing Ryan Serhant continues his quest to build the world's swankiest real-estate brokerage. Could getting in on the ground floor of new-build luxury flats constitute a big step up the ladder? As ever with a show like this, if you don’t like the people you can always just gawp at the incredible houses and apartments.

Jack Seale

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