TV Preview: W1A (BBC2, Monday 10pm)

Plus: The Next Jamie Vardy (Sky 1, today 11.30am), Bad Move (ITV, Wednesday 8pm), Quacks (BBC2, Tuesday 10pm), Liar (ITV, Monday 9pm), Rellick (BBC1, Monday 9pm), The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4, Tuesday 8pm), Doc Martin (ITV, Wednesday 9pm)

Careering: together, like many of us in this business we call media, the ‘W1A’ team are trying and failing to understand an industry future that has already happened (BBC)

The evenings may be drawing in, and the nights colder and the days wetter, but there is one brightening, warming aspect to our lives: the return of W1A for a third series. Much deserved, I have to say. OK, Spinal Tap (film) and The Office (TV) may never be surpassed in their mockumentary brilliance, but the BBC has certainly been producing some outstanding successors lately – People Just Do Nothing, now drawing to a close this week with the possible wedding of the century between MC Grindah (Allan Mustafa) and Miche (Lily Brazier); This Country, by Daisy and Charlie Cooper, back next year for another journey into the skiddies of Cotswolds society; and of course the self-referential satire on the Corporation itself, W1A. They’ve not yet made an episode of W1A featuring the team trying to, say, commission a new comedy mockumentary about the eccentricities of the BBC, but the writer, John Morton, and cast are the very people to make such a thought experiment work. After that they could make an episode about “their” mockumentary team having a meeting to discuss the ratings of the “new” mockumentary. And so on until their actorly minds exploded.

Anyway, it is difficult to pull out a star performer from such an ensemble performance, so I won’t, and I’ll leave that, as appropriate, to the Bafta judges. I’ll just name check a few of the higher profile figures in the first episode. So that’d be David Tennant, doing the narration again; Hugh Bonneville as the long-suffering BBC Head of Values Ian Fletcher. Not since the heyday of Benny Hill has anyone used their eyebrows to such devastating comic effect. Then there’s Anna Rampton as Sarah Parish, BBC Head of Output, complete with “resting bitch face”, Monica Dolan as (“I’m not being funny but”) chippy Welsh BBC Head of Comms Tracey Pritchard, and BBC Head of Inclusivity Lucy Freeman (Nina Sosanya), the only sane one who always looks like she’d rather be back making (BBC) programmes. There grows a certain frisson between her and Ian, made all the more intense by the discovery that her role may be “unimagined going forward”, something that could also affect Ian’s scrubby patch of BBC territory, as custodian of all things ethical.

Apart from that we get a cross-dressing Match of the Day pundit who is “naturally crap”, a kind of Wayne Rooney in a cocktail dress; the new “More of Less Initiative”; the Great British Bike Off; the BBC Bun; memes, UGC; trending content; Gary Lineker; BBC Me; emojis, the Renewal Group, Salford and, disturbingly, a takeover of PR firm Perfect Curve by a Dutch company named Fun Media, which is anything but. Naturally, Jessica Hynes is superb as Siobhan Sharpe, no longer the boss at her own PR firm and desperately trying to cling onto pride and status against an unamusing and unamused Netherlandish interloper. He has a beard.

Together, like many of us in this business we call media, the W1A team are trying and failing to understand an industry future that has already happened. As Siobhan might analyse current trends: “OK guys, here’s the thing, the thing, right, the thing is, here’s the thing, OK… nobody watches TV, it’s over. OK. Like, totally. It’s the past and this is the future. Here’s the thing… let’s not bore the ocean here guys, we’ve got mashable content, regressive media, apps, misu, Get Glue, iMe, YouMe, FastBix and Netface…” Terrifying.

What we you doing in 2012? Chances are it wasn’t so radically different to what you’re up to these days. Jamie Vardy, now, obviously a football superstar, legend and living god, was then a sporting nobody, playing for non-league Stocksbridge Park Steels, in the equivalent of what would be the English eighth division, if such a thing existed. Then,via FC Halifax Town, Fleetwood Town and a mere £1m transfer fee, he moved to Leicester City and thence to the top of the Premier League in the 2015-16 season, as we all know. That, I think, must be an unprecedented achievement. The Next Jamie Vardy is inspired by that story, and this six-part fly-on-the-wall Sky documentary follows the fortunes of some other talented non-league players who have been shortlisted to attend the V9 Academy, which is run by Vardy and hs agent John Morris. In front of scouts from around the world the hopefuls will be looking to repeat something of Vardy's fairytale success. It would be nice to think that the V9 Academy is, in its modest way, doing a little to rebalance the game towards homegrown top-flight players. Fingers crossed for them all, then. By the way, the rumours of a movie based on the life of Vardy seem well founded. (Sounds like the Life of Christ, but with groin injuries, no?) Vardy apparently wants James Corden to play him. Fingers crossed for that, too.

I’m not sure if Bad Move will prove the best vehicle for the talents of Jack Dee. The new ITV sitcom sees Dee and Kerry Godliman star as a couple who’ve moved to the countryside, only to find that things aren’t quite as idyllic as once they imagined. It sounds a little like a domestic version of the ill-fated adaptation of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence if you can remember that far back (1993, and John Thaw’s only flop). Surely what we really want is a post-Brexit version of A Year in Provence, again with British ex-pats now marooned in hostile rural France, where all the characters have these simmering frustrations and hatreds running beneath arguments about plumbing and baguettes. Anyway, for now you’ll have to do with this Bad Move.

Elsewhere, it is a case of more of the very good same. Quacks, an improbable “costume” sitcom about mid-Victorian medicine, comes to the end of its series, with some unusually encouraging developments in the life of its fatally flawed central character Dr Robert (Rory Kinnear). Narrow; dry; understated; intelligent; superbly acted – this is how all situation comedy should be done.

For the rest you can spend many hours of your waking life undergoing renewed emotional trauma by proxy via the twin Williams brothers’ creations Liar and Rellick. To recover via vicarious comfort eating you should be amazed by the most imaginative uses for caramel in The Great British Bake Off. To finally send you into premature senescence there’s a welcome back to Doc Martin, Martin Clunes' charming light drama that has apparently gained some sort of mass global cult following based on not much at all. Maybe a plot line for W1A?