Down Cemetery Road – a fresh female take on Slow Horses

Even without these hygiene challenges, there were always going to be comparisons to Slow Horses, which has just concluded its fifth series – also on Apple TV+ – and is made by the same production company. Both shows are based on books by Mick Herron; Down Cemetery Road, the author’s 2003 debut novel, is the first in the Zoë Boehm series and is adapted here by Morwenna Banks, a Slow Horses screenwriter.

Spiky haired, leather-jacketed Zoë (Thompson also executive produces) is caustic like Lamb too. After her husband and co-worker, Joe (Adam Godley), observes that she berates him like she’s his mother, she responds: “Well, sometimes, I feel just like your mum picking you up from the fuck-up creche.” When Ruth Wilson’s gutsy but fragile art restorer Sarah visits the agency, with concerns about a huge explosion in her neighbourhood and a missing child, Zoë announces she’s not good with female clients: “I don’t drink prosecco. I don’t bond emotionally and I’d probably end up fucking the handsy husband.” Joe says to Sarah: “Now that Cruella’s gone to hunt for puppies, who’s for coffee?”

These are bold, funny opening episodes – the first two of eight. The dilapidated detective agency brings to mind JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, but we’re soon navigating recognisable Herron terrain: sinister stonewalling over the child’s disappearance, a dubious suicide, links to military action, an enigmatic stranger (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) and mega violence delivered by menacing hitmen (led by an offbeat Fehinti Balogun).

There are also Herron-esque high-level cover-ups. One establishment official, played with clipped tones and venom by Darren Boyd, pressures a cringing, Smithers-like underling (Adeel Akhtar from Sherwood) to sort it out: “You need to get down on your hands and knees and mop up this piss fountain you’ve created before it becomes a piss geyser the size of Old fucking Faithful.”

Looking ahead, the series becomes somewhat congested with characters and plot strands, while Sarah’s life – failing marriage, job – is all but forgotten. Without wishing to give too much away, the endgame involves excessive capital-A “Action”, with interminable running around on a deserted Scottish island. Thompson and Wilson are too often separated by storylines, which is a shame, as they spark brilliantly together. With a script resistant to lazy girl-power tropes, this female duo feels fresh, scathing and – considering the other books in Herron’s Boehm oeuvre – promising.

James Bluemel’s Once Upon a Time documentary strand has thus far looked into conflicts, with 2020’s Once Upon a Time in Iraq and Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland in 2023. Bluemel’s technique – to painstakingly intersperse footage with oral accounts from ordinary participants – works with such eloquent simplicity that it’s transformed the concept of the historical television documentary. His new series, Once Upon a Time in Space, applies the same format to tell the story of the Nasa space shuttle programme, which started in 1981 and ran for 30 years.

It’s an engrossing tale, taking in the shuttle project (designed to travel frequently), initial Russian space dominance, the International Space Station, astronauts (interviewed here, along with Russian cosmonauts) who were drawn from volunteers with the mythical “right stuff”, and family members, including CNN correspondent Kristin Fisher, the daughter of astronaut couple Anna and Bill Fisher. The Fishers discuss how Anna, the first mother in space, received savage criticism in a way astronaut fathers didn’t.

The series covers the disasters: the 1986 Challenger shuttle that exploded shortly after liftoff, with victims including the gifted African American physicist Ronald McNair (his brother Carl is interviewed). The catastrophe grounded the shuttle for almost three years, and there was another disaster in 2003, when the Columbia disintegrated on re-entry. The point is made that the future of space travel is probably commercial – funded by billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Personally, I would no more likely volunteer to go to space than to be lowered into a vat of boiling tar, but this docuseries is fascinating and emotional. Astronauts bob about in zero gravity trying to eat lunch. A friendship between a US astronaut and Russian cosmonaut, formed on the astonishingly shabby Russian Mir space station, is shown to have endured to this day. Back then, it is posited, space could also be about peace, human endeavour and common goals. Towards the end, modern astronauts talk sadly of Russia invading Ukraine in 2022, watching the red flashes of bombs from space.

On Sky Atlantic, tying in with Halloween, It: Welcome to Derry is the eight-part prequel to the cinema spin-offs of Stephen King’s 1986 novel It. Bill Skarsgård reprises his role as Pennywise the clown from the movies It (2017) and It Chapter Two (2019). Developed by the same film-making team, Andy and Barbara Muschietti, and writer Jason Fuchs, it’s set in fictional Derry, Maine, in 1962. With a black US air force family moving in for a secret mission, themes emerge: scarring childhoods, small town US A evil, missing children, racism, Native American burial grounds and nuclear threat.

I don’t frighten easily with horror, but It: Welcome to Derry is full of imaginative jump scares, Nightmare on Elm Street-style. The opening sequence ends with an abused boy, Matty (Miles Ekhardt), trapped in a car with psychopaths and the graphic birth of a flying devil baby.

The younger cast (played by Clara Stack and Blake Cameron James, among others) ride bikes like the kids in Stranger Things, but (spoiler alert) a bloodbath in a cinema confirms this doesn’t ensure survival. Interestingly, King’s characters from other books appear: Chris Chalk plays a young Dick Hallorann, the psychic chef from The Shining. The main drawback? They rationed the clown. Flashing his nightmarish grin, clutching his spooky balloons, Pennywise takes an age to show up – a perplexing decision. Other than this, horror fans are guaranteed a wild, gory, nasty ride.

Daisy May and Charlie Cooper’s NightWatch

(BBC Two)

Entertaining series looking into sites of paranormal activity. In the opener, the This Country sibling duo (below) spend the night bantering and bickering in the supposedly haunted Gloucester prison.

Trigger Point

(ITV1)

Return of the high-stakes bomb-disposal drama, starring Vicky McClure. This time, Lana Washington (McClure) is struggling to recover from PTSD.

Girlbands Forever

(BBC Two)

A companion to 2024’s acclaimed docuseries, Boybands Forever. Members of Little Mix, All Saints, Mis-Teeq, Sugababes, Eternal and Atomic Kitten discuss fame, pressure, body shaming and the Spice Girls.

Photograph by BBC/KEO Films/NASA