The week on television: The Little Drummer Girl; The first; House of cards and more | Television and radio

The small threshing machine (BBC One) | iPlayer
The first (C4) | All 4
Room of cards (Netflix)
Hitler Holocaust Railways C5)
Black earth up (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Great British cuisine (C4) | All 4

"If you saw The night manager, "Ringed continuity, out of breath," or even if you did not, you do not want to miss that. Sorry, what are you talking about, man? "Even if you did not …"? In which case, why mention it? Nevertheless, I suppose it breaks the monotony of hearing that "contains certain scenes that some viewers may find unsettling / disturbing / moderately stimulating / interesting" before each non-broadcast on CBBC or Nickelodeon.

Aside from the fact that both were marked with the Cornwell / Le Carré imprimatur, there were few links to link to The small threshing machine. Or director was iced and starred and camped like Christmas, it was in 1979 and, in the hands of the South Korean director Park Chan-wook, refreshing, stripped of all pomp, wonderfully subtle, to the point that it sometimes seems that the Whole year only included various shades of tan and dun.

And the appalling theater agitprop in London, and the appalling Berlin music "rock", and a frightful terrorism, at the time when they had to be at least slightly creative with their lies. Like the spies, the Mossad in this case. So we are entering a world of orange typewriters, tensions, tobacco, mustaches, hard men and women and compromise. And difficult sacrifice.

Charlie (Florence Pugh), the young Englishman, plays here with a mixture of sbad, suss, gullibility and sordid privilege, which is magically, perceptively just for those years, even though Pugh was not born until 1996. When the plot finally goes to Greece – Tel Aviv also includes – the director finally admits a little color and you get a living sense of the hot and sparkling freedoms for young people on a deserted beach around 1979, all guitars and auto stop and intellectuals in water.

And yet, this is only a brief respite for Charlie before being attracted by his hormones in the claws of the blue mustaches of the Mossad and their ruthless, dirty and necessary wars against those who swore to rid them of the Earth . There is nothing glamor, little charm, The night managerBecause it is not a question of money, but of survival, of salty and brutal survival, with cordite and nails, and I can not wait to see what is really happening.

There was inevitable inevitability in the Channel 4 / Hulu co-production The first, almost from the beginning, that something was going badly wrong. Super-astronaut Grizzled Sean Penn was hit, you see, after leading the first human mission on Mars, and when we saw him cool his feet in the civilian world (running, his torso naked, with the inflatable Labrador, Lake Testosterone shores), you realize that the flight is doomed: they could not go to Mars without the dog chops on board. From then on, the tiny backlogs of the flight crew and a gigantic explosion resembling that of Challenger appear.

There are some very nice things to do – the rush of rush, for example, to strip the hangar / ballroom from the balloon and champagne reception center, because the families are now meeting at the very beginning of sorrow – and the runner Beauimon certainly has the courage to see him (Room of cards) framing the series in this way. Much of the concentration is necessarily focused on guilt, recriminations, adaptation, blame, rush to get back on track. I do not think it's before the eighth episode that they finally enter the space itself.

And Penn, despite all my snark, is a great leader. Natascha McElhone, too, does an amazing job as Laz Ingram aerospace mogul – thinks that Elon Musk has surprisingly fewer social skills – and that, overall, it looks pretty good as a three-way fight between business ambition, technology and life. That said, it's hardly at the limit of reality: too many glances in the night sky with nostalgia, while the sound poems are not read in the light. Maybe I was simply missing, superficially, new explosions.

On return (delayed) Room of cards – and, my God, how much I did not realize how little Kevin Spacey would miss us. Robin Wright intensely sublimated. It dominates simply by inhabiting, like Francis, all the scenes in which it appears, and we see the skull under the skin, rather than snatches.

The series begins with the badysis by the social workers of her first 100 days as president. She is terribly unpopular. "God has never intended a woman to rule this country." Moreover, she is Jewish, so is, if anything, the sweetest. It is a sinister listening, wonderfully, with regard to polarized New America. It's the last series, damn it. Bring him horribly. writers would seem to have an unshakable understanding of what is really happening in real life. The death of the fictional Francis remains unexplored, but there are allusions.

For once, I was extremely impressed by Chris Tarrant. His journey Hitler Holocaust Railways – and Channel 5 does not offer the products in terms of documentaries now? – was wise, sober and sober, including an enthralling testimony and revealed, among other things, how the Nuremberg rallies and its train network – a city so beautiful! So much stupid hate like a pork shit! – were essentially, four years before the war, and with the glowing young Nazis, a dry track for the essential logistics of mbadive displacement of Jews by train to the camps. The thought behind the solution began in 1935.

More than a million people have also died, often with machetes, in Rwanda. Black earth upThe phenomenon of Hugo Blick explored all this and more and also offered us, almost incidentally, one of the most subtle and subtle and delirious explorations of modern African politics, that every writer either white or black, was aware. It has been slow, often confusing, but ultimately great. This should be high on everyone's 2018 list and reminds us that sometimes, if only sometimes, writers should be allowed to claim the best of the art.

Rahul, having lost all confidence to the extent that I worried just when he would decide to be quietly afraid of his own laces, as usual surpbading the cooking, to a joyous and beautifully scented extent. And won. Often, less is more: watch the end of Cook Of under a candied October moon, it reminded us that sometimes, more, it is more. Brave, fiery and geeky winner, and the first male winner for a long time, he lost in the end for mealy words. Britain today does not need to smooth and scream; sometimes, being a researcher, winning the job and being kind is allowed to say anything.