BBC

Hosting duties moved to Canada for 2022’s series, where the main distinction seemed to be that the winner was crowned “Queen of the Motherpucking World.”

Unlike the regular series of Drag Race, the power to make someone ‘sashay away’ is not in RuPaul’s hands. At the end of each challenge, the top two contestants lip-sync for the chance to not only win the episode, but to choose which of the worst performing queens to expel. In previous series, this has knocked out some top performing fan favourites early in the competition.

Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer is written and directed by Danny Ben-Moshe, and concerns Nazi hunter groups established by Jewish vigilantes in post-war Australia. The film follows three brothers as they try and see if their dad and uncle, both of whom survived the Holocaust, were involved.

Criminal Record

Wednesday

Apple TV+

From the mind of Vera creator Paul Rutman comes Criminal Record, a stern detective drama focusing on the effects of institutional errors, centring around an old ‘solved’ murder case.

Albeit in the form of a fresh hell for its participants.

There was something slightly sadistic about how gripped millions of us were last year, watching 22 people descend into the very depths of paranoid despair as they systematically picked off one another. But you just couldn't deny how fascinating it was to see, writ-large, the processes (in-group and out-group, herd mentality) we'd only really read about in our A-Level psychology textbooks.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office

ITV1, 9.00pm

The Detectorist’s Toby Jones stars as the Erin Brockovich of the British Post Office Scandal, Mr Bates.

Murder is Easy

Wednesday

BBC One, 9.00pm

Following the Kenneth Branagh tradition of ensemble cast Agatha Christie adaptations, the BBC’s version of the 1939 crime classic stars Industry’s David Jonsson as retired policeman Luke Fitzwilliam.

What have we done?” bemoans the decapitated head of Sir Humphrey Bone, after the nation’s favourite spectres make a defining decision in the final episode of Ghosts, which goes out as a Christmas special on BBC One. “We did the right thing,” Julian Fawcett, the trouserless MP ghost, says confidently.

Discussing the BBC’s Across the UK strategy – which seeks to shift creative spend and decision-making out of London – the BBC’s Chief Content Officer praised Blue Lights and Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland.

Moore said: “What both Blue Lights and Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland demonstrate so brilliantly, is that thinking bigger about how we harness and showcase the creativity of the whole of the UK is paying huge dividends – for us and for audiences.”

By a delicious irony, Yes Minister is being rerun on BBC Four at the same time as the Covid inquiry grills the country’s leading civil servants and politicians.

No one, though, could confuse the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby with Party Marty or the deputy cabinet secretary who brought a karaoke machine to one of the illegal lockdown parties at 10 Downing Street.

The scheme will be comprised of workshops, expert-led sessions and networking opportunities across an eight-week period. From June 2024, the soon-to-be script writers will learn each stage of writing for screen, covering all bases.

This will be the second “Write Across” scheme the BBC has initiated after the successful “Write Across Liverpool” last year.