by Ben Felsenburg
Yes, Sheridan Smith: Coming Home (Sunday 4, ITV, 9.30pm) marks the fact that the star has a new album just out to sell – A Northern Soul – but it’s also an intimate view of the singer as she battles through her troubled private life while maintaining a cheery public image. Look out for when she takes to the stage in Doncaster to sing on the very same spot where she revealed her talent to the world as a child.
Fact-based feature- length drama Doing Money (Monday 5, BBC2, 9pm) is a shocking, chilling glimpse of the hidden darkest recesses of our society. Young Romanian immigrant Ana has been snatched off a London street and forced into a relentlessly grim existence as a prostitute: effectively a sex slave. You’ll be moved to fury by what Ana’s subjected to, but hope emerges, in part thanks to a dogged investigating policeman played by Allen Leech Downton Abbey’s Branson).
Harry & Meghan: The First Tour (Monday 5, ITV, 9pm) follows the newlyweds on their epic trek through the Southern hemisphere, as they travel across Australia, Fiji, Tonga and New Zealand over 16 days. Cheering crowds fill the streets all the way, but it’s in Sydney at the Invictus Games that the couple are more passionately involved than anywhere else, while everywhere the parents-to-be field the immense interest of the public in the baby expected next year.
Then Harry’s Pater competes for ratings in Prince, Son and Heir: Charles at 70 (Thursday 8, BBC1, 9pm). Just a week before the 70th birthday of the Heir to the Throne, documentary maker John Bridcut (who two years ago gave us Elizabeth at 90) reveals life behind the scenes for HRH Prince Charles over the previous 12 months, as he conducts matters of state, on tour in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, and at home at Clarence House and Birkhall, Aberdeenshire. The result is an affecting portrait of a man undertaking his every task with utter commitment and dutifully preparing for when he will one day be King.
Egon Schiele: Dangerous Desires (Saturday 10, BBC2, 9pm,TBC) marks the centenary of the artist’s death as a new exhibition of his work alongside that of Gustav Klimt opens at the Royal Academy in London. Punk rock singer Iggy Pop joins the more conventional expert talking heads lining up to testify to Schiele's brilliance and continued ability to shock with the sexual explicitness of his paintings, even now. There’s revealing insight in Schiele's own words, but we could probably do without the strained contemporary dance sequences.
The fallen of the Great War are commemorated in World War One Remembered: The Cenotaph (Sunday 11, BBC1, 10 am), when at 11am it will be exactly a hundred years since the guns at last fell silent. Her Majesty The Queen will look on from the balcony of Foreign & Commonwealth office as the Prince of Wales and other members of the Royal Family take part in the traditional wreath-laying ceremony at the foot of the Cenotaph. The coverage continues with the Westminster Abbey service to mark the Centenary of the armistice (BBC1, 5.10pm).
