TV preview: A Year in the English Garden: Flicker and Pulse (BBC4, Thursday 9pm): Slow TV with horror movie potential

Plus: Retreat: Meditations from a Monastery (BBC4, Tuesday 9pm ), Gunpowder (BBC1, Saturday 9.10pm), Sounds Like Friday Night (BBC1, Friday 7.30pm), Man Down (C4, Wednesday 10pm), The End of the F*****g World (C4, Tuesday 10.20pm), Stranger Things (Netflix, from Friday)

‘A Year in the English Garden’, with its time-lapse photography and occasional human voices, is wonder-inducing and slightly alarming

Like many recent innovations, “slow television” in its current phase originated in Scandinavia, although we Brits were actually there first back in the 1980s when a certain Peter Middleton plonked a camera in the driver’s cabin of an InterCity 125.

And not to overlook the Berlin-based Bahn TV, who followed train rides across Germany from 2003 to 2008 – so, no, the Nordic nations didn’t get there first, although they’ve been making up for lost time ever since, with their own log fires, train rides and knitting marathons. And they’ve been joined by BBC4, perhaps because they are relatively cheap to produce and BBC4 is not exactly overflowing with cash.

A Year in the English Garden is from the Jason Bourne action-movie end of slow television, what with its time-lapse photography and occasional human voices. The essential meditative quality is there, however, as ambient music accompanies sped-up footage of plants growing, blooming and rotting as the cycle of life repeats itself in a walled Sussex garden.

It’s all rather wonder-inducing and slightly alarming – presenting gardens as living, breathing organisms instead of mere bucolic retreats (there’s a horror movie plot suggested here – perhaps featuring a homicidal flower bed) and it makes a change from Alan Titchmarsh or Monty Don telling us when to plant tulip bulbs or prune roses.

For full-on slow TV, check into Retreat: Meditations from a Monastery – which (to quote the blurb) “goes in search of inner peace at three British monasteries”. In Thursday’s visit to Belmont Abbey in Herefordshire, my inner peace was disturbed by one monk who had particularly squeaky shoes.

Religion was not always so peaceful in this country, and Gunpowder takes us back to Guy Fawkes and all that, except that Fawkes was only a bit player in the plan to blow up King James I in 1605. By rights, children should be asked for “a penny for a Rob”, as Robert Catesby was the arch-conspirator, and this Catholic recusant is played by his own descendant, Kit Harington of Game of Thrones fame – or Christopher “Kit” Catesby Harington to give him his full name.

(From left) Kit Harington, Edward Holcroft and Tom Cullen star in the graphic but gripping ‘Gunpowder’ (BBC/Kudos) (BBC / Kudos)

Anyway, Gunpowder is intelligent (scripted by Ronan Bennett) and doesn’t shy away from the more graphic violence of the era – including a particularly gruesome execution scene that should keep telephonists at the BBC complaints department (if such a thing and such people still exist) busy on Saturday night.

Sounds Like Friday Night, BBC1’s first stab at a weekly (non-reality) music show since Jimmy Saville trashed the memory of Top of the Pops, will presumably be the very opposite of slow TV – in fact, it seems so nervous of anything remotely resembling a pause that alongside the usual musical sets we’ll be having guests presenters (this week, Jason Derulo) and sketches, the first featuring Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters. Sounds exhausting, but at least you won’t be able to hear Derulo and Grohl’s squeaky shoes.

And anything but slow and meditative is Man Down, the returning sitcom starring and written by Greg Davies and Mike Wozniak. It’s a meagre week for comedy (a sad farewell, however, in passing to W1A, whose magnificence is crowned on Monday night with a cameo by the BBC director general Tony Hall), so I’m prepared to be generous to a show that I half-like – the other half feeling that, rather like Davies’s man-child character Dan, the humour has bludgeoned my finer sensibilities into submission.

More interesting is The End of the F*****g World, despite a title that has gone straight for the nuclear option in its attention seeking. The first episode introduces us to 17-year-old James, a trainee psychopath looking to graduate from murdering small animals. His first human victim, a classically alienated teen called Alyssa, then presents herself when she offers to become his girlfriend. The two leads, Alex Lowther and Jessica Barden, are ones to watch.

It feels more Netflix than Channel 4 (it’s a co-production between the two) and the suburban setting manages to suggest both Britain and America – presumably deliberately so. But for pure, unadulterated Netflix turn to the online broadcaster’s biggest hit to date, apparently (the streaming service doesn’t do such old-media stuff as publishing viewing figures), the returning Stranger Things.

If watching a bunch of kids pedalling like fury on their chopper bikes as they’re pursued by a monsters sounds like pure 1980s B-movie popcorn, then you wouldn’t be totally wrong – except that this is far superior to that reductive description.

There’s a smashing young cast, with a stand-out performance from the British-born Millie Bobby Brown as the telekinetic Eleven, while it’s good to see Winona Ryder – a proper grown-up now rather than an elfin lost girl – back and at the top of her game. With The Last Post and Our Girl as the drama alternatives on the BBC, the case for shelling out for Netflix becomes ever more compelling.