The Way

Monday

BBC One, 9.00pm

Good Omens’ Michael Sheen not only stars in and directs The Way, he also co-created it alongside filmmaker Adam Curtis (HyperNormalisation) and screenwriter James Graham (Dear England).

Although the events in The Way may bear similarities to real industrial uprisings, the trailer makes it very clear this is a fictional tale, with the opening line: “once upon a time, in a kingdom far far away.” After civil disorder mounts after a town meeting, the Driscoll family (comprised of Sheen and It’s A Sin’s Callum Scott Howells, among others) become fugitives and leave their small industrial town, running towards an unclear future and hoping their pasts won’t follow them.

Breathtaking

Monday

ITV1, 9.00pm

NHS Doctor Rachel Clarke wrote her novel Breathtaking to honour the doctors and nurses she worked alongside, and the patients she served, during her time on the Covid frontlines. With the help of former doctors Prasanna Puwanarajah (The Crown) and Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio, Clarke turns her memories into drama, with Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt portraying Clarke.

Across three episodes, Breathtaking will take viewers through the reality of working for the NHS within a pandemic - the pressure they worked under, the lack of PPE, and the horrors of watching families say their final goodbyes over Zoom.

To read more about the creation of Breathtaking, check out our Television magazine interview with Clarke and Puwanarajah here.

Joe Lycett Vs Sewage

Tuesday

Channel 4, 9.00pm

The comic known for taking on parking tickets with an original flare and going head-to-head with David Beckham begins another great fight – this time against the masses of untreated sewage which end up in our British waterways.

Lycett began hinting at his new cause back in November - unveiling ‘The Turdis’ at the Liverpool docks, before ‘accidentally’ spilling 'sewage' into the water. His goal is to have water companies stop paying dividends and invest that money into fixing this problem. (Lycett’s sewage was not real sewage and caused no environmental impact).

Boarders

Tuesday

BBC Three, 9.00pm

RTS Award-winning writer Daniel Lawrence Taylor (Timewasters) writes a bildungsroman comedy set in an elite private school.

When five black disadvantaged students are given a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, they move out of London and into St Gilberts. There, they are tasked with growing up with majority white and privileged boarders – their task made harder by the school's ethos: “the scholarship kids need to fit into the school, and not the school around them.”

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Thursday

Netflix

A live action remake of the early 2000s classic cartoon sees Gordon Cormier star as Aang - the last Master of Water, Earth, Fire and Air. In other words, the last Airbender.

In this universe, humans can telekinetically control one of the four elements. Only very few can ‘bend’ all four, and they are known as Avatar. Although the nations used to live peacefully side by side under the rule of the last Avatar, since their passing the fire benders have risen up and annihilated almost all of the air nomads.

12-year-old air nomad Aang is the world’s only chance at survival, but he must learn to master and control all the elements, all the while being the fire nation’s number one target.