TV Preview, Michael Palin: A Life on Screen (BBC2, Sunday 9pm): The most ripping yarn of all

The Python star, globetrotter and diarist gets a tribute as befits his national treasure status

BBC2 is putting on a special Michael Palin night on Sunday, marking half a century at the posh end of showbusiness and journalism (BBC)

Oftentimes it’s the case that Christmas television viewing is the climactic highlight of the viewing year, and the first weeks of New Year something of an arid time, like drying out after your seasonal overindulgence. However, I’m pleased to report, 2018 is marking a bit of a departure from that dreary routine and we have some fine shows to look forward to, as good, in fact, as most of the supposedly choice stuff we were served up over the holidays (and, yes, I am still recovering from the Mrs Brown’s Boys specials, which I try not to be snobbish about but always just make my skin creep).

Silent Witness and The Voice are both back, reliably delivering the ratings for the BBC and ITV respectively, and, quite rightly, we’re also straight into national treasure territory again. BBC2 is putting on a special Michael Palin night on Sunday, with a compilation of very early Monty Python sketches, billed as (what else?) And Now For Something Completely Different, and the more rounded Michael Palin: A Life on Screen, which details Palin’s remarkable half century at the posh end of showbusiness and journalism. (He’s a witty diarist too, if you get the chance to read the published volumes.) As the years go on the Python stuff becomes increasingly divided between a category of timeless classic writing, such as the “is this the right room for an argument?” sketch, and another category which is just dated and, dare I say it, politically incorrect, like the soldiers camping it up on parade. Some Python material, it has to be admitted, would not be made today, and that’s probably a good thing. Anyway, you can refresh your own memory this week.

Fresh from Blue Planet II and Attenborough and the Empire of the Ants, the apparently inexhaustible Sir David turns his attentions to his earliest passion, as a teenager bicycling around Leicestershire fossil hunting – the great mystical creatures of prehistoric times. And few things are as entrancing as a 200-million-year-old sea monster that found itself washed up in Dorset (as so many prehistoric light entertainment stars since have found themselves). Attenborough and the Sea Dragon is a must-see, as is the new BBC1 series Big Cats. I don’t care how many times over the decades I’ve seen a lion chasing after a hapless wildebeest across the veldt, a trope that became such a cliché it was actually parodied by Spitting Image 20 years ago, and I still find it thrilling. Like dinosaurs, we can’t get enough of the big cats.

The successors to Python, broadly speaking, are the gang behind The League of Gentlemen, who did enjoy an excellent Christmas revival. Like the Pythons they’ve all gone on to other endeavours, and none more accomplished than the bijou wonder of Inside No 9, one of the most intelligent comedy shows to have emerged in recent years. Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith write and star as an ageing double act, ably supported by Sian Gibson.

Television has always had the power to do good, and I find that all the channels are, rather unobtrusively but determinedly, pioneering a better understanding of LGBT issues, for example in some prominent soap storylines at the moment, and there have been some notably humane and sympathetic documentaries about trans people. Certainly the treatment and understanding of the real medical and ethical questions about the care and support that should be given to young trans people are being much better shown in TV than in the press. ITV’s Transformation Street, despite the slightly bad-taste title, is a sensitive three-episode programme that details the real-life stories and surgical challenges of a number of people transitioning from one gender to another. It has the potential to be another tiny step on the road to a better more tolerant world, where trans people are regarded as equals in a tolerant society.

You should also be looking forward to the final instalments of Feud; Bette and Joan, the magnificently told bio-drama about the magnificent animosity between two Hollywood legends, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Jessica Lange (Crawford) and Susan Sarandon (Davis) are at their bitchy best, making their parallel journeys down Sunset Boulevard.

Last, I am happy to recommend a couple of current affairs documentaries of the type we see all too rarely on our screens these days. Working Class White Men is a timely look by Professor Green at one of the defining social issues of our times, being the extremism of the “nationalist” right to those who feel they have no stake in society, the mirror image of the radicalised Islamists we hear rather more about. House of Saud: A Family at War is an excellent effort, as a three-part investigative series, to penetrate the closed and secretive world of Saudi Arabian politics, plus its connections with terror. It isn’t entirely reassuring about the future of this regional superpower.

Michael Palin: A Life on Screen (BBC2, Sunday 9pm); Silent Witness (BBC1, Monday 9pm); The Voice UK (ITV, Saturday 8pm); And Now for Something Completely Different (BBC2, Sunday 10pm); Attenborough and the Sea Monster (BBC1, Sunday 7pm); Big Cats (BBC1, Thursday 8pm); Inside No 9 (BBC2, Tuesday 10pm); Transformation Street (ITV, Thursday 9pm); Feud: Bette and Joan (BBC2, Saturday 9.15pm and 10pm); Working Class White Men (Channel 4, Tuesday 10pm); House of Saud: A Family at War (BBC2, Tuesday 9pm)