TV preview: 'Bodyguard' finale and the launch of 'Strictly Come Dancing' – everything to look forward to this week

Bodyguard has livened up our Sundays, but Saturday nights are still a dull Seventies pastiche

Well I hope you are among the 10 million-plus – record-breaking audiences – enjoying Bodyguard, and thus looking forward with mixed emotions to Sunday evening’s finale.

The epically extended edition – at 75 minutes – has its work cut out. With Keeley Hawes, apparently, dead and buried as home secretary Julia Montague – assassinated by person or persons as yet unknown – much rests on the talents of Richard Madden as the eponymous protector, Sergeant David Budd, and new female lead Gina McKee, as top cop Anne Sampson. They will need, I’m guessing, to be able to turn quite a few more corners as the tale twists its way seemingly inexorably towards Number 10, and a prime minister with a past. Yet that is only the start of the many, many mysteries surrounding what has happened in the previous five, action-packed hours.

Even if the denouement of Bodyguard is a bit of a disappointment, it can be forgiven for the superb entertainment it has afforded the nation over the summer – a welcome distraction in genuinely troubled times. Bodyguard is impactful – literally, with the bombings and shootings – topical, contemporary, slick and gripping; everything the ubiquitous costume dramas aren’t. It is also a welcome return to “proper” TV, which is to say a tightly scripted and directed drama that works, delivered in weekly instalments. Though available on iPlayer for catch-up purposes, the episodes were not made available to preview in a binge.

Bodyguard should itself be protected as an exemplar of what TV drama evidently still can be. The awards are in the post.

Meet the judges: Dame Darcey Bussell, Craig Revel Horwood, Bruno Tonioli, Shirley Ballas (BBC)

Aside from that, a more conventional form of British diversion returns on Saturday, with the launch of the latest sequinned series of Strictly Come Dancing. No, I’ve never quite got the point of it, and am old enough to remember the absurdity of the original Come Dancing, when a team from, say, Wales would go up against the north west with a military two step, the gents all in tails and the ladies in billowing frocks. It was hosted by a proper old school gent by the name of, I think, Peter West, who looked very much at home in a dinner jacket. Even in the 1970s it was painfully anachronistic. Look at us now! Is this as good as it gets?

Ridiculous as all that was, the notion of Kate Silverton – who reads the news – and various other “slebs” I’ve never heard of prancing around is dafter still. In fact, we may have reached the stage when some of them are less well-known than their dancing coaches, which tells you all you need to know about modern culture.

The whole of Saturday night telly – both main channels – seems to have regressed into a pastiche of the 1970s with talent shows and glitz, and needs blowing up. I’m not advocating the return of Noel’s House Party or Michael Barrymore – I’m not that disturbed – but why can’t we have something new for a change? Is it really so difficult?

Talking of our atavistic habits, there’s nothing like a documentary about Elizabeth II to guarantee mid-market tabloid publicity and some decent ratings just when you need them. Hence ITV’s Queen of the World. I suppose that, back in 1952 when she ascended the throne, the Queen had a claim to be queen of quite a lot of the world. Ireland and India had gone by then but she was still sovereign of all sorts of places – Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Uganda, Kenya, British Somaliland, British Guiana, Hong Kong, South Africa, Malta, Cyprus, Nigeria, Gambia, Sierra Leone – plenty to keep her occupied. Today she remains head of a Commonwealth which is mostly made up of republics of varying degrees of integrity and is, of course, the United Kingdom’s premier diplomatic weapon. Here you can watch her in all her majestic action and wonder a little about what the jug-eared future will bring.

There is a woman in Redcar who has a tattoo of Boris Johnson on her person, which must be reason enough to find time to see The Mighty Redcar. It’s a documentary of a kind too rarely seen, with the simple purpose of holding a mirror up to ourselves, or at least that part of ourselves that resides politically, morally, economically, politically and spiritually in working class communities. It’s basically a sort of Zoo Time look at the people who voted Leave, which comprise, after all, roughly half the population even now. The BoJo fan is, you’ll be relieved to hear, an aspiring Conservative politician, which is bad enough but she’s at least not been certified. I just hope Boris never asks her to show it to him. Or maybe that’s the whole idea.

Manson: The Lost Tapes is, I suppose, a show that should have been made some time ago, given most of the material featured in it has been around for the half century or so since the old maniac was banged up for the murder of seven people under the influence of his strange cult. And I’m talking about the American mass murderer here, not the British prisoner who models himself on the former to the extent of taking his name, and who rides prison officers as ponies whenever he gets the chance. Maybe you’ll get to understand the power of the cult though these aged taped interviews and testimonies, or maybe you’ll just enjoy the ghoulish, macabre thrill of peeking into such a dismally fantastic world.

The Spanish flu that ravaged the world a century ago is chronicled in ‘The Flu That Killed 50 Million’ (BBC)

Equally disturbing, though more remote, is the Spanish influenza that broke out at the close of the Great War a century ago, recalled in The Flu That Killed 50 Million – many more than “the war to end all wars” did, though the huge movements of troops and civilians globally, unprecedented at the time, no doubt contributed to its rapid spread and deadly effects.

Such a pandemic has not befallen the world since, but we are invited to wonder if it could yet recur.

Not quite what they seem: The Few, scaled down (Channel 4)

Probably the maddest experiment of the week has to be Battle of Britain: Model Squadron. I’m not sure whether to be appalled, impressed or both, but Channel 4 considers it a good idea to re-enact the Battle of Britain, 1940, in 2018, but yes, with model aeroplanes. Thus, “the many” of the toy Luftwaffe are up against The Few ... of the miniaturised RAF. On balance, I would imagine never have so many been embarrassed by so few.

By now you will either have “got” The Circle or retired baffled by the collision of social media and reality TV. Seeing as Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother (still going on Channel 5 if you care to look) are all the professional gawper has to feed upon – apart, that is, from the “real” world of social media, which is open all hours and knows no moral or technological limits. It ought of course, to be called antisocial media.

Bodyguard (BBC1, Sunday 9pm); Strictly Come Dancing (BBC1, Saturday 6.15pm); Queen of the World (ITV, Tuesday 9.15pm); The Mighty Redcar (BBC2, Thursday 9pm); Manson: The Lost Tapes (ITV, Thursday 9pm); The Flu That Killed 50 Million (BBC2, Tuesday 9pm); Battle of Britain: Model Squadron (Channel 4, Sunday 8pm); The Circle (Channel 4, Sunday to Friday 10pm)