This week’s TV reviewed by people who can’t afford DVD box sets.

The Rattigan Enigma
BBC4
Thursday, 28th July
9PM
(Watch it here)
Documentary about the interwar playwright who wrote Mater And Pater Are Coming With Us To The Country, There’s Nothing Quite Like Some Scones, Who Wanked Off On My Flip-Flop? and Manners, Dear, presented by Benedict Cumberbatch. Having recently appeared in a Rattigan revival himself, BC argues that we ought to revisit the master of the drawing-room three-parter, and look anew at his desperately out-of-fashion canon. So he goes to Harrow School, his and Rattigan’s alma mater, to see what the factors were that formed him. After earnestly studying photographs of cricket teams from 1921, it turns out Rattigan was secretly the world’s first hip-hop poet. And a breakdancer. Who used to send stink bombs to the police and made dreamcatchers out of the leftover clothes of children killed in house fires as a radical art experiment. Definitely not just a slightly stiff guy who did those endless plays about middle-class manners. So there you go.
7
ORVILLE SOWWEE

The Hour
BBC2
Wednesday, 27th July
9PM
(Watch it here)
Ah, The Hour. Or ‘Britain’s answer to Mad Men‘ as it was trailed. Why are you so piss poor? Could it have something to do with characterisation best illustrated by the lead character’s potted biography on your website?

“Freddie Lyon is a grammar school boy who excelled. His mother, May, died two years ago, leaving him alone to cope with his father, Malcolm, who is struggling with dementia. Freddie is brilliant, more than he knows. Outspoken and often brighter than those he works with, his contemporary, Bel, is one of the few people who totally gets him. A meeting of opposites, Bel sees in Freddie a similar determination to forge a new life in a society free from the shackles of class and wealth.”

Yes: He is Mr DAMAGED HERO who is SYMBOLISING THE NEW MERITOCRACY. His first name is that of an AFFABLE WORKING CLASS LAD and his surname is a CUNNINGLY DISGUISED ALLUSION TO THE KING OF THE JUNGLE. As Freddie has it when dressing down Dominic West’s hapless Oxbridge toff, “It’s nothing personal, I just don’t like privilege.” Freddie, what are you really trying to say here? What’s the subtext? Spell it out for us.
4
SHIR KHANTS

Beaver Falls
E4
Wednesday, 27th July
9PM
(Watch it here)
The first part in a serialisation of a paedophile’s fever dream, which hinges on the question of whether a 14-year-old boy has ejaculated onto the flip-flop of his adult carer. Did E4 think this through? Their Goofball Laugh Department was shooting for the Something About Mary market. But Mary was of consensual age. Her ejaculator was of consensual age. None of that related to the seminal vesicles of a boy who, legally, cannot give consent. Do we live in a society in which E4 can openly parade the flip-flop on which a child has experienced orgasm? Is that a society that you, or I, or Ed Miliband would like to live in? Ed, stop diluting your opinions. Get out there and denounce Beaver Falls today, or find yourself forever co-aligned with this senate of idiot pederasts.
2
ED SILLYGLAND

Dragons’ Den
BBC2
Sunday, 31st July
9PM
(Watch it here)
Farewell, then, James Caan, and good luck in the court case brought against you by former contestant Sharon Wright, who alleges that you reneged on so much of your initial agreement that you ended up buying a 22.5% share in her business for £29. For that reason, you are out. Well, according to the Beeb press office, for “undisclosed reasons” you are out, but at least you’re still better than that Dragon from series one, who went belly-up after buying into Red Letter Days and had to sell off all her remaining assets to her fellow judges. Back to the present, and Caan’s replacement is Hilary Devey; a lady trucking magnate who, by the looks of her, began life pulling the trucks herself. “Where there’s muck there’s luck,” she growls halfway in, and with that it’s obvious that she’s the star: a Northern female Alan Sugar who will definitely have her own spin-off by 2012.
7
ALAIN SUCRE