TV preview: Poldark, Celebrities on the NHS Frontline, Reporting Trump's First Year and more

Plus of course there's the World Cup and the start of Wimbledon... does anyone want to watch that?

Another year, another dose of Wimbledon presented by Sue Barker (BBC)

The summer of sport grunts on, with two weeks of Wimbledon as well as the World Cup providing some rich excitements, even if Colombia knock England out on Tuesday. If they don’t then we can expect record audiences for England’s fixtures with Sweden/Switzerland…and who knows where it will end?

Whereas football is usually much better viewed on television than live in a stadium, I’m not sure the same can be said for flower shows – you can see but obviously can’t smell what’s going on. At a football match that’s usually a bonus, not least because you can’t smell the fear so often exuded by the England squad, but it’s not so great if you’re deprived of the sensual scents the world’s greatest horticulturalists have created for humanity’s pleasure.

Still, not everyone can get to Hampton Court Palace for the annual Royal Horticultural Society Show, so you can get a bit of a sniff of things instead with the BBC’s helpful nightly package of the “action” that BBC2 will be broadcasting for the duration. It’s all about design and lifestyle you see, the Chelsea Flower Show, not just tedious stuff like flowers. Once you understand that you’ll never get bored.

Reporting Trump’s First Year: the Fourth Estate is, right now, an especially poignant take on President Trump’s relationship with the media. In this week’s epside if the excellent series filmed in the New York Times newsroom, we find journalist Michael Schmidt getting a scoop on former FBI director James Comey’s relationship with Trump. The president’s abrasive, aggressive hyperactive style has generated vast interest, copy and revenues for the media generally, but the long-term effects of his demonisation of journalists ad journalism, the facile soundbites about “fake news” and the hateful atmosphere he has been responsible for have also inflicted damage.

Romesh Ranganathan finds himself in Haiti for the first episode of his new series (BBC)

This is just one small, but emblematic, part of that story, as is Inside the American Embassy, Channel 4’s remarkable insider documentary on the work of the United States embassy in London. Last week’s highlight was some pathetic crawling by the British defence secretary Gavin Williamson – on camera, no less – and this week sees Trump’s migration policy and “ban” on Muslims in all its gory glory at work on the visa department.

If you’d like an antidote to Trumpism, check out Rich Hall’s Working for the American Dream: there can be few figures more different in style and maturity than Hall, who is as sardonic and funny as Donald Trump is not. I’ve always wondered if the American dream is really a myth, if not a nightmare, and, if the rise of Donald J Trump wasn’t enough to confirm you in that view, than Hall will happily oblige. They say Americans don’t get irony, but, like the American dream, that is also evidently a bit of a myth.

The British, of course, do do irony, and magnificently so in The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan, the bearded wonder of comedy’s brilliant new series. It takes a special skill to be able to be funny in and about Haiti, the destination for his first misadventure, and you might think they’ve suffered enough without having some idiot funnyman turning up. However, as I say, with a rare old talent he manages not to be patronising or offensive, and, as we probably all know, you are not sentenced to instant death the moment of your descent from the plane at Port-au-Prince.

Poldark is an odd show because I find myself increasingly sympathetic to the supposed villain, the clever and wicked George Warleggan, and irritated by Ross Poldark and his clan. So it’s difficult to be too moved by the concatenation of tragedy that awaits them this week, but all too easy to be enthused by Warleggan’s attempts to get back into the House of Commons by buying his way into a rotten borough. That’s how politics used to be, you see, full of nasty types and riddled with corruption. Thank goodness we’ve moved on.

‘Poldark’ continues to liven up Sunday nights (BBC)

In case you’d not noticed, the NHS is 70 (on Thursday, in fact) and there’s almost as many programmes with celebs getting in the way on hospital wards as there are international football matches on the telly. Much of it, such as The NHS: To Provide All People and Celebrities on the NHS Frontline is well-meaning but saccharine and preachy, but there exceptions. Black Nurses: The Women Who Saved the NHS is an important story worth telling (and repeating, as here, as it was made a couple of years ago), about how nurses from the Caribbean came to Britain to work in the hospitals and keep the NHS going as it coped with the never-ending pressures of a demanding and depressingly racist society.

It’s as much about social history as it is about the NHS, which is why it’s more watchable than most of the rest of the epidemic of celebrations. Like the nurses who came and come still, from the Philippines, Ireland, Poland, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the Indian subcontinent and many other places the make the most telling case of all for migration – that immigrants don’t just use public services; they are the public services. They deserve some thanks.

World Cup Football (BBC1 and ITV); Wimbledon (BBC1 and BBC2 from Monday 11am); RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show (BBC2, Tuesday to Friday 9.30pm); Reporting Trump’s First Year: the Fourth Estate (BBC2, Sunday 10pm); Inside the American Embassy (Channel 4, Monday 10pm); Rich Hall’s Working for the American Dream (BBC4, Wednesday 9pm); The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan (BBC2, Sunday 9pm); Poldark (BBC1, Sunday 9pm); The NHS: To Provide All People (BBC2, Saturday 8pm); Celebrities on the NHS Front Line (BBC1, Thursday 9pm); Black Nurses: The Women Who Saved the NHS (BBC4, Monday 10pm)