TV preview, Revolution: New Art for a New World (BBC4, Monday 9pm): An impressive and informative spectacle

Plus: Blue Planet II (BBC1, Sunday 8pm); Nigella: At My Table (BBC2, Monday 8.30pm), MasterChef: The Professionals (Tuesday, BBC2 8pm), Rick Stein's Road to Mexico (BBC2, Tuesday 9pm), Grand Designs: House of the Year (Channel 4, Tuesday 9pm), Chris Tarrant’s Extreme Railways (Channel 5, Monday 9pm), Detectorists (BBC4, Wednesday 10pm), The Fight for Mosul (Channel 4, Tuesday 10pm), Hotel for Refugees (BBC1, Tuesday 10.45pm), Pride of Britain Awards (ITV, Tuesday 8pm)

‘Heads (Human in the World)’ by Pavel Filonov, one of the revelations in Margy Kinmonth’s eye-opening new series (Foxtrot Films)

The arts still don’t get much of a show on British television – testament, were any needed, to the dogged philistinism of the English (the geographic term here used advisedly). So it is a delight to see our national broadcaster doing its bit to shove a bit of culture into our lives, if only via BBC4.

You ought to try to see Margy Kinmonth’s Revolution: New Art for a New World – a documentary about art that so deftly and skilfully combines those famous old Reithian values to such magnificent effect. We all think we know a bit about art and what the Russian revolution did for (and later, to) artists and their work – Kandinsky, those bold modernist propaganda posters, collage, socialist realism, gigantic statues of Lenin hailing a taxi, that sort of thing.

We might also think we know what good television looks like until we see Kinmonth’s innovative and stunning use of familiar Moscow scenes, not to mention the way she educates the viewer without condescension about the philosophy and history of paintings and sculptures we know little about (well, I speak for myself). We are taken through terms such as “the semaphore of suprematism” and “analytic realism”, an introduced to names that should be much better known. As with so much of the Russian revolution, what promise it might have had in 1917 – which was certainly considerable in avant garde art if nowhere else – was extinguished by the triumph of Stalin.

Pimenov’s Get Heavy Industry Going! (1927) was one of the earliest of the new socialist realism school which was to become the stultifying orthodoxy of the Soviet Union until its collapse, and of course the genre is alive and well in Pyongyang to this day. I was distracted, too, by a striking portrait by a Pavel Filonov, entitled The Kolkhoznik (Member of a Collective Farm), which, fittingly, bore an uncanny resemblance to Jeremy Corbyn, who is in a sense also a member of a collective farm (the House of Commons). If you only ever watch one art documentary or one programme about the Russian revolution, then make it this one.

‘The Kolkhoznik (Member of a Collective Farm)’ – remind you of anyone? (Foxton Films) (www.foxtrotfilms.com)

As Sir David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II got off to the most astonishingly good reviews, a further paean of praise seems superfluous, so I shall just mention, in case you’ve been living under a stone, or with the Deep Sea Divers down at the bottom of the ocean, that the second instalment of this landmark series is on Sunday.

Can any other natural history filmmaker anywhere claim to have so long and so fine a record of achievement as Sir David? For that we must thank him, the teams who made his work come so vividly to our screens and the BBC that makes such things possible. Just remember that next time you see some Murdoch hack slagging it off.

Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook are back with a new treasure trove in ‘Detectorists’ (BBC)

Bake Off may have been and gone, but there is no shortage of foodie treats for viewers this week, including Nigella: At My Table, MasterChef: The Professionals and the travelogue Rick Stein’s Road to Mexico. Architectural pornography is served up by Channel 4 with the return of Grand Designs: House of the Year for a new series, with Kevin McCloud, as ever (which is to say a good thing). You may also be taken by the photography of Morocco in Chris Tarrant’s Extreme Railways. It seems like only yesterday I was watching him chuck custard pies around on Tiswas.

I ought also to mention the new run of Detectorists, featuring the writing and direction of Mackenzie Crook, who also stars with Toby Jones and Diana Rigg in this understated comedy about blokes (and one female) who go metal-detecting. Actually the comedy treasure lies in the satire, the observation, the beautiful filming and the exquisite torture of the main characters. Like finding a rare item of Anglo-Saxon jewellery in a potato field, extremely enjoyable.

The Fight for Mosul is every bit as grim and important as it sounds. The wars in Iraq and Syria have been well chronicled, analysed and argued over, but there is no harm in seeing for yourself, if vicariously, the reality of what happened. If you have a conscience then it will make you ask what, if anything, the West and little Britain could have done in recent times to repair the damage we caused in the past.

One thing the West did do, unevenly and sometimes unwillingly, was to take in the refugees of war. In Hotel for Refugees we witness the incredibly uplifting story of one small Irish village (population about 1,800) that welcomes around 200 Syrians who arrive almost randomly in a disused luxury hotel to make new lives. I’ll not spoil it beyond telling you, confidently, that it is the most moving thing you’ll see on screen all year. A rare chance to see the human spirit at its most noble, and religion doing some good.

If that’s not enough to restore your faith in human nature, then you’ll just have to watch the Pride of Britain Awards with Carol Vorderman, the schmaltziest thing on the telly all week.