America’s response to global conflict is a painful watch; Trump adviser Roger Stone beggars belief. Plus, the orgasmic comedy drama that may help when the Olympics are over

Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? (BBC Four) | iPlayer
A Storm Foretold (BBC Four) | iPlayer
Paris Olympics 2024 ( BBC / Eurosport / Discovery Plus )
Slip (ITVX) | itv.com

What to say about Dror Moreh’s BBC Four docuseries Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? That it’s a damning indictment of a superpower that intervenes in global atrocities only when it suits its own interests. That it leaves you rinsed in hopelessness and disgust. That it opens with second world war Nazi death camps (a genocide ignored at the time) and the vow of “Never again”, then, episode by soul-crushing episode, produces proof that “again” is exactly what’s allowed to happen.

The standup on his new Netflix special, falling off a table in front of Timothée Chalamet, and why silly jokes are back

Phil Wang, 34, was born in Stoke-on-Trent to an English mother and a Chinese-Malaysian father. He grew up in Malaysia before his family moved back to Bath during his teens. He studied engineering at Cambridge, where he was president of Footlights. He began his standup career by winning two student comedy awards aged 20. TV appearances include Taskmaster and Have I Got News for You , while he recently had acting roles in Wonka and 3 Body Problem . His second Netflix standup special is released next month.

What’s with the new moustache?
It’s an experiment. My girlfriend asked if I could grow one because she’s into the look. She’s the wind beneath my wings, moustache-wise. Now I’ve written some standup about having one, so it’s locked in for the time being.

Celebrity PopMaster TV is back with Toyah Willcox, MistaJam and others in the music business put to the test. Plus Miriam Margolyes in Australia. Here’s what to watch today

8pm, Channel 4
Ken Bruce’s amiable – if frequently pretty challenging – music quiz returns with a pair of celebrity editions. Can the people who earn their living from music retain the same exhaustive knowledge as the fans? This opener features Toyah Willcox, Richard Blackwood, Sally Lindsay, MistaJam and Kimberly Wyatt. Phil Harrison

The NBA star takes on an unusual new role in a shaggy new series imagining what would have happened to his less successful childhood friend

Given the crop of current NBA stars, casting Steph Curry as the leading man in a network sitcom is a radical choice. Rising star Anthony Edwards is a bigger personality. Reigning MVP Nikola Jokic is a better straight man. Klay Thompson, Curry’s former Splash Brother, is a situational comedy unto himself – as apt to turn up in an man-on-the-street TV news interview about New York City scaffolding as laugh at his online mimics.

Nevertheless, it’s Curry who is the star and executive producer of Mr Throwback – a new Peacock series that seems a piece of a larger strategy at NBC Universal to retain its outsized Olympics audience, snatch back its TV comedy crown from Disney (home of Abbott Elementary) and recapture some of its old Thursday-night swagger. It’s also somewhat of a teaser for the 2025-26 NBA season, when NBC will carry games again after a 23-year hiatus. NBC’s rights deal effectively pushes Warner Bros Discovery to the sidelines and would seem to spell the end of Inside the NBA, the standard in basketball comedy .

Globe-trotting in search of picture-perfect scenes for the screen is not always as glamorous as it sounds. But to better understand these unsung heroes’ shadowy art, you first have to track them down …

The script called for a tree: a magical kind that looked like no tree on Earth. It would need to look like it had been standing for thousands of years. It would need to be in a wood full of dark twisty branches and dense canopies. It would need to seem like the place that a hardened nobleman might escape to for a moment of quiet. And Robert Boake knew just the one.

Boake had been working as a location scout in Northern Ireland for a few years, when in 2008 a producer sent him the script for the pilot episode of Game of Thrones . The producer “got me in my car exploring Ireland”, Boake explains, his excitement clear over the phone. “He said: ‘Go anywhere you want, and find me cool stuff and send it back to me.’ It was an unbelievable time of exploring and getting lost and photographing castles. There’s such an array of different looks. You’ve got Georgian stuff, Victorian stuff. You’ve got cliffs, you’ve got forests, you’ve got big open plains, big grasslands.”

Amy Poehler narrates this soft, soul-cleansing delight – which will make you go for a chic black coffee then throw away nine boxes of rubbish. Blessed relief!

Very rare a TV show affects me anymore, of course. I have seen, simply, too many of them. I have seen every configuration of dating show and every possible ITV2 Love Island spin-off reality format. I’ve seen every Channel 4 property programme and every doomed BBC One attempt at a Saturday night light entertainment blockbuster. I was the person who watched every single British odd couple road trip show they made in the wake of Covid. I’ve seen those shows on Apple TV+ that even the executives at Apple TV+ forgot they commissioned (“Hold on, what’s this line on the balance sheet marked ‘Joseph Gordon-Levitt’? We paid him for that?”). Every brown-and-grey “the enemy is at the gates, my lord!” attempt at an epic franchise in the wake of Game of Thrones and all the spin-off stuff Prime has done since The Boys. TV can’t get me any more. I’m TV-proof. I cannot be swung by TV! My nervous system is too dulled!

But I do have to concede that W’s new US import, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (Thursday, 9pm), did make me go round my office with a bin bag and not stop until I’d filled it with detritus (as ever, the thought is: “how long have I been living surrounded by a bin bag full of detritus?”). It’s a simple remix of Marie Kondo’s massive Netflix hit from a couple of years ago, which you might remember from that weekend you got all weird and said goodbye to your old socks one by one. Based on a New York Times bestselling book, Death Cleaning … explains the Swedish philosophy of clearing your house out of all your collected crap well in time for your death, a sort of semi-holy ceremonial tidy-up that allows you to confront the end of your life in a pragmatic way as well as gift treasured items to those in your family who might remember you by them. It does not feel like you need to be dying to get something out of this, though: in truth, it’s just another self-help book that uses a load of quirky terms and umlauts to tell you to just – for goodness sake, come on! – tidy up your loft a bit, please.

Sport fans could face choice between watching eagerly awaited tennis match and Euros quarter-final

Andy Murray’s final Wimbledon flourish could clash with England’s quarter-final match at Euro 2024 on Saturday evening, forcing sport fans and BBC schedulers into a tricky dilemma.

Murray and Emma Raducanu will team up in a mixed doubles match against Marcelo Arévalo and Shuai Zhang on No 1 Court. The match, which is the last one scheduled to play there on Saturday, looks likely to start in the early evening while England face off against Switzerland at the Merkur Spiel-Arena in Düsseldorf.

House of the Dragon just made eyes pop with an erect penis – but it’s not the only show going to great lengths to challenge television’s nudity equality problem

It’s not just winter that’s coming. This week’s episode of House of the Dragon featured not one but two penises: one mid-fellatio, the other post-coital. If original fantasy epic Game of Thrones became known for “sexposition” – advancing the plot against a backdrop of bare bodies – its prequel seems to be dealing in “dicksposition”.

Just past the midway mark of episode three, as a tipsy King Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney) arrived at a King’s Landing brothel with his jeering entourage, he strolled past a sizeable erection in the process of receiving a blowjob. The bratty monarch didn’t seem to notice. Viewers certainly did.

It won’t be long till everything from Drag Race to Keeping Up With the Kardashians could be written without humans – and you might be able to write yourself as the hero of a new show. But will robot TV ever be up to snuff?

Justine Bateman won’t name names, but a TV showrunner friend once came to her with a dilemma: their show’s team was well into filming its second season when a network executive had an idea. A character in the pilot hadn’t tested well with audiences, so they were just going to go in, use a little AI, and swap in someone else.

The showrunner – and Bateman, an actor and director – were understandably incensed. “When you change the beginning of something, you change the creative trajectory,” says Bateman. “There’s going to be whiplash for the viewer when they get to episode three or four because what was set up in the pilot got messed with and now doesn’t make sense.” Using AI might have seemed like a simple solution to the executive, but to the showrunner, it was catastrophic.