TODAY

STAG, BBC1, 9pm

THIS opens like every crime drama you’ve ever seen, with a dark dreary landscape and heavy clouds gathering on the horizon. Bleak piano music plays as a car slowly winds its way through the sinister hills. I’d probably have switched off at this point if it wasn’t for the fact that this is a comedy series, and no ordinary comedy but one starring the dark genius of Reece Shearsmith.

It’s a three-part comedy thriller set in the Highlands and begins like a parody of An American Werewolf in London: Ian, a small and polite little Englishman in a dinner jacket, finds himself in a wild Highland village and he ventures into the local pub to be met with silence and sneers. “You shouldn’t be here,” he’s told but the silence is soon broken by a bunch of idiots who come dancing through the pub in a conga line.

Ian is in the Highlands for a stag weekend but he’s seems a bit too genteel for the antics which are planned. The rest of the party are arrogant, wealthy bankers from London who’ve come to Scotland to indulge in “sleeping rough, hanging tough and stalking your prime rib deer across the Highlands.”

But when they leave the pub and enter the wilderness, this bunch of bankers are reduced to frightened schoolboys, being stripped naked and threatened with drowning and perhaps rape by stags and it becomes a comic version of Deliverance set in the Highlands.

TRAPPED, BBC4, 9pm

THE makers of Trapped really do take their title literally and are employing all the forces of the brutal Icelandic weather to trap the townsfolk in their little fishing port setting.

If blizzards and frozen waters weren’t sufficient to provoke a panicked sense of claustrophobia, we’re now presented with an avalanche.

Of course, this horrific weather not only creates a suffocating, hostile atmosphere but it has practical consequences too: the avalanche cuts off the phone lines and the electricity, so everyone is trapped in the town with a killer and with no way to call for help or know if he’s advancing upon them through the icy blackness.

The tiny police force are overwhelmed and must long for the days when all they had to worry about was stolen fish.

Andri remains a reassuring bulky figure, representing goodness and decency, but he’s finding it hard to reassure the population that all will be well.

TOMORROW

CHURCHILL’S SECRET, STV, 8pm

This feature-length drama stars Michael Gambon as Churchill and is set in 1953, in “the precarious days of the Hydrogen bomb”.

The Cold War has established itself and, although still in office, Churchill’s glory days are over. He’s portrayed here, not as bombastic, cigar-puffing Churchill, but as a frail elderly man, one who fumbles with buttons and braces, leaves his shirt-tails hanging out, and drifts off into mumbled renditions of I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.

He’s clearly unwell and when he stumbles and stutters during a speech in Downing Street to an Italian delegation (later asking “what Italians?”) his doctor is called in and it’s feared he’s had a stroke.

His indomitable wife, Clementine, immediately cancels all engagements and packs him off to Chartwell for rest and a young nurse is hustled away from her post by Special Branch to take care of him, but she is sworn to secrecy: no-one can know that the mighty Churchill is weak and confused.

As the Churchill children gather at Chartwell to prepare for the worst we see the tensions and pressures they endure having never been able to live up to their father’s famous name.

THE NIGHT MANAGER, BBC2, 9pm

Roper has gathered his entourage for a feast by the sea. The glamorous group arrive by speedboats and the show once again feels like a Sunday evening helping of James Bond.

As they drink and feast, gunmen burst onto the scene and kidnap Roper’s son and through a crack in the door we see that Pine is hidden and observing the attack.

Flashing back to six months earlier, Burr makes Pine a job offer: she wants to recruit him and place him in Roper’s inner circle. She’s tried everything else but just can’t nab him: “I’ve had microphones up his arse and I cannot get close to him!”

But is Pine up to the task? “There’s not an hour you will not be scared but you will nail him” she says and, in her blunt Yorkshire tone, she asks, “You oop for it?” Unable to resist such charm he agrees, and they create a criminal persona for him so that Roper will think he’s a suitable man to draw into his circle. And then we see that the kidnapping at the beginning is not what it seemed.