Playing unhinged head-butting Yosser Hughes in Boys from the Blackstuff made Hill a legend. But, from Titanic to The Lord of the Rings, his entire 50-year career was outstanding

Some time in 1980, on the first sheet of a script that would eventually run to 221 pages, Alan Bleasdale typed the line: We see Yosser with his three children. He is leaning forward.

When the jobcentre clerk explains he is “afraid” he can’t do anything, the pale-faced, dark-moustached man snaps: “Afraid? Y’ll be terrified in a minute. [Leans in.] Now sort me soddin’ Giro check out before I knock y’into the disability department. ”

All the things you expect from a classic drama are here: heroism, suspense, stirring music. But against a backdrop of true horror, this well-intentioned show becomes utterly grotesque

There is that word, that name, sitting there in the title, coming up before each ad break: Auschwitz. There had better be a good reason to invoke it. The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a drama that raises the question of whether fiction can ever be an appropriate response to the Holocaust; on this evidence, perhaps not.

In 1942, a young Slovakian Jew named Lali (Jonah Hauer-King) is deported to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland. He is soon given the task of tattooing serial numbers on to the arms of new arrivals – one of them is Gita (Anna Próchniak), with whom Lali falls instantly in love. Thanks to the privileges Lali’s job brings, and the protection given to the couple by the unstable SS officer Stefan Baretzki (Jonas Nay), Lali and Gita are able to pursue their romance and survive. Decades later, in Australia, the widowed Lali (Harvey Keitel) invites rookie writer Heather Morris (Melanie Lynskey) to hear his story, of the Holocaust and of his life afterwards with Gita.

The actor struggles with a distractingly unbelievable British accent in Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s tiresome espionage drama

The intimidating glut of prestige shows rushed to air before the end of the Emmys eligibility period makes it harder than ever to know how one should portion out viewing time. Recent weeks have seen new projects from big names like Park Chan-Wook with stars such as Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas and Julianne Moore while the remaining days see actors like André Holland and Benedict Cumberbatch premiere dramas alongside the return of awards magnet Hacks.

There’s an inevitable impossibility for the average viewer, and voter, trying to schedule it all in and so certain shows will, and must, be sacrificed. The Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s globe-trotting spy drama The Veil is the perfect lamb for the job, a bafflingly bad time-waster that can be easily excised and promptly forgotten. It’s a hodgepodge of shows we’ve seen before – a bit of Killing Eve, a touch of Homeland – but it’s mostly reminiscent of a junky Netflix action movie only stretched over six episodes and with a laughably straight face. Perhaps if it had been told in less than two hours with more light-footed action to distract us, it might not have been such a slog.

He was the first disabled actor to play Richard III at the RSC. As he appears as Shardlake, the star recalls the parts that made him – and explains why this latest character is like the Lone Ranger

Arthur Hughes wants to go on adventures. “When I was little,” he says, “I loved films. I loved Jurassic Park. I loved Back to the Future. I loved things I probably wasn’t supposed to watch, like Predator. And then of course I loved all the Disney classics. To go to a world that isn’t your own is so exciting. I wanted to tell stories like that.”

It was this desire that saw him first take to the stage in school plays, and then to eschew university in favour of drama school – although his parents persuaded him to apply to both, just in case. “There was nothing else I wanted to do,” he says. The gamble paid off as he has landed some huge roles – including being the first disabled actor to play Richard III at the RSC, and co-starring in the BBC drama Then Barbara Met Alan, the first primetime drama about the disability rights movement . To hear him tell it, his whole career has been one big thrill.

It’s a huge leap from playing a bent copper in Line of Duty to starring in the musical Guys & Dolls, but if anyone can make a role work, it’s actor Daniel Mays

In 2017, the British character actor Daniel Mays was nominated for a Bafta. His one-episode turn in the police procedural Line of Duty , described as “visceral”, “outstanding” and “stomach-clenchingly tense”, had impressed his peers. The nomination was a turning point in his career, but it was also a bust: he didn’t win and he was so nervous during the award ceremony that he couldn’t enjoy the evening. “You’re sort of anxious that if they say your name you’ve got to get up in front of the great and good of your entire industry and be coherent .” After the ceremony, a party kicked off in someone’s hotel room. “Adeel Akhtar was there,” Mays recalls. “Anna Friel was in the room.” Feeling a vibe, he left to buy cigarettes and got stuck in a goods lift. By the time he re-emerged, everyone had disappeared. “It was not the way I’d wanted the evening to pan out.” He tuts. “I may have had something to drink.”

Mays is talking over lunch at an almost empty members’ club in central London, in the wake of being nominated for another award, the Olivier, following a year-long stint in a very popular production of Guys & Dolls , at the Bridge Theatre. The nomination has him reliving concerns about getting up on stage: What does he say? How long should he talk for? That second question was answered at a lunch put on for nominees. “They said, ‘Listen, if you win, you’ve got 40 seconds – that’s it. And if you go over 40 seconds, we’ll play you off with the band.’” He winces at the thought of his waffling being slowly drowned out by music, then relaxes slightly. “I recognise now that just being nominated – I know this is a thing people say – is an amazing achievement. I’m just going to try to enjoy it.”

It’s four decades since the comedy drama detailing the exploits of British migrant workers in Germany burst on to our screens. As they stage a live show, its writers and stars let us in on how they constructed a classic

In November 1983, a new television series that focused on working-class labourers debuted on ITV. Auf Wiedersehen, Pet told the story of seven men who felt it necessary to leave their families and Thatcher’s Britain in order to earn a living wage. Dennis Patterson (Tim Healy), Neville Hope (Kevin Whately), Leonard “Oz” Osborne (Jimmy Nail), Barry Taylor (Timothy Spall), Wayne Norris (Gary Holton), Albert Moxey (Christopher Fairbank) and Brian “Bomber” Busbridge (Pat Roach) were, between them, brickies, electricians and carpenters who lived and worked together on a construction site in Düsseldorf, Germany, where they bonded, pined for home and drank away their sorrows. Mostly written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, and performed by a cast of young actors, it proved an immediate hit, and helped launch its leads, who went on to careers in film, theatre and music.

The show immediately hit a collective nerve. Like Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Black Stuff the previous year – which covered similar themes of high unemployment and the spectre of a bleak future – Auf Wiedersehen, Pet also managed to be funny. It quickly gained weekly audience figures of around 14 million. It has perhaps gone on to endure so well because, by focusing on the complicated business of male friendship with the suggestion that beneath all the bluff and the bravado their love for one another ran deep, it was ahead of its time.

Set in a spooky Tudor monastery, Arthur Hughes and Sean Bean must solve a fateful crime while all the monks seemingly have secret affairs. It’s fun, knowing TV … I just hope you’ve all done A-level history

I have figured out my thing with murder mysteries, after many years of trial and error, and it’s this: stop trying to figure them out. Never once in my murder mystery-watching career – and I was a child raised on Jonathan Creek! I should be good at this! – have I correctly guessed the murderer. Here’s why: you’re not meant to be able to. The whole point about being a storyteller is you’re just making silly tricks up, and that goes triple for a fictional murder mystery.

Every time you pin a murder it can be wiggled out of by a sleight-of-hand of story. “Oh, and by the way this woman you’ve never met before actually saw the whole thing” – mmm, useful, thanks. “There was no murder, they fell” – ah yes, very enjoyable way to spend my Sunday evening. Thanks for nothing. The way to enjoy murder mysteries, I have decided, is to turn your brain off entirely and let the nonsense wash over you. It’s just a story. Stop trying to guess.

He melted hearts as Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid, but his latest role couldn’t be more different – playing an Auschwitz tattooist in an epic Holocaust drama. The actor opens up about how his own family’s plight inspired him

It’s not every day that I meet a real-life Disney prince. It’s even more discombobulating when he tells me he spent the weekend cheering on Clapton CFC women’s team in windy east London. “Before The Little Mermaid , a lot of people told me, ‘This is going to happen! That is going to happen!’” says Jonah Hauer-King, who starred as Prince Eric in last year’s remake. “It’s just really not the case. I wouldn’t say my life has changed much. Honestly.” It’s probably about to, though. Massively.

The 28-year-old lifelong Londoner is sharply suited and booted in the capital’s Corinthia hotel, ready to take on a full day of press with the poise and charm that clearly helped him bag that wide-eyed royal part (he even convincingly claims that these interviews are worth missing his beloved Arsenal’s Champions League game in the evening for). His next project, however, is a world away from Disney dreams.

The recent Oscar nominee plays a cop investigating the brutal death of a teen in this noble but clunky retelling of a horrifying crime on Hulu

As a true crime drama in the year 2024, Hulu’s Under the Bridge at least knows the giant potholes of the genre to avoid. The eight-episode limited series starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough, an adaptation of Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 book on a sensational murder in Canada, knows not to glorify law enforcement as hyper-competent, or to privilege perpetrators’ emotional lives over a faceless victim’s, or to depict gratuitous violence. “I think people should be remembered for who they were, not what happened to them,” Keough, as Godfrey, tells the parents of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old girl horrifically beaten to death and drowned by both strangers and her so-called friends. As an exercise in how to make entertainment out of a real crime with real perpetrators and victims – particularly Virk, ably embodied by Vritika Gupta – Under the Bridge is self-aware and empathetic, clearly thinking through implications, its heart in the right place.

Unfortunately, as a television show, it often has the feeling of flat cola – tepid, stale and reminiscent of something buzzier and brighter. Though it assiduously dodges some of the worst of the so-called “dead girl” tropes, it falls prey to the most irksome ones of prestige streaming TV: bloated episode counts, multiple timelines, blurry formal shifts, portentous voiceovers, mistaking correct politics (on racism, incompetent law enforcement, trauma and more) for nuanced, compelling craft.