NORTHANGER ABBEY

ITV1, 9pm

Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel is a delight from beginning to end. It is a light-hearted love story between a young girl (Felicity Jones) who believes that everyone in the world is as sweet-natured as herself, and an amusing young man (J.J. Feild, above, with Jones) who possesses “the best and truest heart” in the world. Their love, needless to say, is beset with complications and played out against the social whirl of Bath and the Gothic horrors of Northanger Abbey. Superbly cast and bursting with energy and humour, it achieves a contemporary immediacy without the loss of any sense of period. It is so fresh and funny that, by the end, you may be left feeling giddy with happiness. See Caitlin Moran, page 4.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS

BBC One, 4.30pm

Although this new series is aimed at younger viewers, adults can also enjoy it — not least because of its sensational cast. Jonathan Pryce plays Sherlock Holmes, Bill Paterson is Dr Watson, Michael Maloney plays a dim-witted plod and Anna Chancellor makes a beautiful and deadly villain — she and Holmes ( left), it transpires, have a history. A gang of artful dodgers — the Baker Street irregulars — assists Holmes and Watson in their investigations; they treat him with a scepticism combined with respect, and in return he treats them with fondness and detachment. In this series, nobody talks down to children.

PLAY IT AGAIN

BBC One, 8pm

In a new series in which six celebrities learn to play a musical instrument, the comedian Jo Brand chooses the organ because “it’s big and bold and dramatic” and gives her the chance to behave like something out of a Hammer horror film.

But here’s the thing. She has only four months to learn to play the instrument before she performs Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in front of 8,000 people at the Albert Hall. Whether she succeeds is almost beside the point. Her courage is off the scale.

THE TRAP: WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR DREAMS OF FREEDOM

BBC Two, 9pm

In the last part of this thoughtful, provocative and superbly made series, Adam Curtis shows how the two highways to political hell are paved with good intentions. Try to impose Utopia, and you end up with the repression of the Soviet Union and Pol Pot. If, on the other hand, human beings are nothing more than self-interested robots responding to the laws of the marketplace, life is robbed of all hope and meaning — especially when manipulation and violence are used to safeguard this negative ideal of democracy.

Many people may challenge Curtis’s argument, but nobody could question his skill as a film-maker or his unique role on television of inquiring into the shadowy theories that dominate our lives.

BEST OF THE REST . . .

MS DYNAMITE: IN SEARCH OF NANNY MAROON

BBC Two, 7pm

The life of the Jamaican woman who led a slave revolt against the British Army.

EXTRAS

BBC One, 10.15pm

David Bowie’s Little Fat Man song — the defining moment of this series.

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