I’ve never read Cranford, and, just between the two of us, neither have you. It’s on our list, though, and has been since we were 18 and first discovered we had a list. Everywhere else in the world, literate people have a list of books they’ve read; only the English have a list of books they haven’t read. Like an embarrassing line of intimates hanging out the back of your intellectual presumption, Mrs Gaskell is a large bra, right at the top of our unread laundry.

BBC historical Sundays go some way to mitigating our bookly guilt. And oh, in how many ways do I hate them – these silver spoons of good-for-you cod-liver oil, the heritage nostalgia, with all its dressing-up-box gurning and posing and emoting. The smug, arrogant nudges that imply the Yanks may have the cash, the glitz and the popularity, but they can’t buy this: a National Trust house, with some daft bint wearing a basket on her head, who’s going to take four weeks to marry a dreary bit of Rada man-totty with a Byronic perm and £500 a year. God, I’m embarrassed by the cringing cultural kitsch of the classic serial.

So, I sat down to Cranford(Sunday, BBC1) girded and gimlet-eyed, my modernist cudgel ready to bludgeon it to a silly pulp. Then, in the very first minute, Eileen Atkins gave me a look – just for a moment, a sideways look, more a glance, really, but it had such depth of character, such promise of interest and intimations of stories to come of hardship and parsimony, of steadfastness, piety, worldliness and a little kindness, all packed together in that one tiny gesture, like an apothecary’s spice box – and I realised it was all up. I was hooked, gaffed, netted and filleted.

Atkins could have me for her tea with tartare sauce. She is the cur’s cods, the terrier’s testicles, the business.

I will go further and declare that Atkins is the finest actor appearing anywhere in the world right now. There is, in her performance, a miraculous ability to project a complex subtext or emotion and motivation in her face and posture, while delivering words that seem real and immediate but, simultaneously, tell us something quite different. With the merest tightening of a lip or flickering of an eye, she raises doubts, opens lines of plot and is able to hold and impart contradictory emotions clearly and profoundly. To be able to do this isn’t just talent or craft or practice, it is an intense sensitivity, an insight into the dilemmas of the human spirit. She is an era-defining actress.

And with her we got Judi Dench. To use a technical term, that was double bubble. Dench was the straight man, the feed, clearing space and giving time to Atkins. It was a performance of immense generosity, born from confidence and the understanding that to listen is as important as to speak; that a part isn’t measured in how many lines you say, but in how many are said to you. Between them, they created scenes of bright brilliance. But then, this was an entire cast of brilliant women, and I could fill the rest of this page with luvvie notes written in violet spittle, but I shan’t.

Cranford is a story of a lot of fairly silly women fussing about things of monumental insignificance. Its thinly redeeming grace as a Sunday adaptation is that, while it treats its costumes and sets with a curator’s dusty obsession, it rightly doesn’t take itself seriously. The plot is simply flung to the actors to make of what they will. Literary Cranford is based on Cheshire’s Knutsford, where the Hamiltons come from. Christine Hamilton could slip right into this series without make-up, costume or, indeed, a script. But the final word on all this is the acting. For all the relentless sniping and moaning about falling standards on television – which, incidentally, have been on a vertiginous slide since the Coronation – you will see better acting on television in any given week than in any other dramatic medium. Simply in terms of skill, range and honesty, television buries film at the moment. And we have a particularly strong cast of actresses who find themselves in their prime. The reason there are so many of them in Cranford is that the only people who will write decent parts for them are dead lady novelists, and that’s not just a shame, it’s a sinful waste of a great national resource.

Matthew Collings said he proposed to remake Civilisation and that Channel 4 leapt at the idea because it would kick the BBC’s arse. First, it is a pathetically childish reason for making any programme; second, This Is Civilisation(Saturday, C4) really didn’t. My father co-produced and directed the original 1969 Civilisation, so I’m not a disinterested judge. I should also say I’m a bit of a fan of Collings’s previous outings into contemporary art. But setting himself up for comparison to Kenneth Clark was foolish. Foolish and vain. Foolish and embarrassing. He was never going to get near Clark’s intellectual or aesthetic breadth and grasp. He just doesn’t know enough.

His delivery, though, is just as mannered. Collings speaks pure irony. His every utterance comes with the rising inflection of Soho sarcasm, the invisible bunny ears of inverted commas. He has so securely Botoxed himself into a pose of knowing postmodern disengagement that he can’t do enthusiasm, commitment or any sort of awe; and, consequently, he made a properly grim pile of rubble out of the first programme, on the birth of classical art, simply because he didn’t have the breadth of expression to rise to its achievement. We kept asking: “Are you being serious – or sarky?” Collings is good on contemporary art when it itself is ironic and self-referential, but when we’re looking at the sublime, he’s a tinkling cymbal. Leaving aside Clark’s Civilisation and judging this piece by its own slim, matt-black merits, at best it was confused, shallow, bereft of insight, perfunctory, visually prosaic and intellectually trite. Clark said his favourite quotation was: “To do as our fathers did is not to do as our fathers did.” Someone should have whispered that to Matthew before he started kicking at arses.

The Blair Years(Sunday, BBC1) – oh, who still cares? Picking over the entrails of the least memorable administration since the second world war can be of interest only to lonely political trainspotters. Blair is apparently worried about his legacy. Well, I can help. It’s not up to him, it’s up to us now, and when we’ve decided what, if anything, it’s going to be, we’ll let him know. Until then, will you please stop bothering us with your relentless self-justification?

Stella Rimington was head of MI5, probably the most powerful woman in the country. As part of her deep secret-service cover, she disguised herself as a dowdy, tongue-tied bore, the sort of person you wouldn’t take the slightest notice of in a lift. In Watching the Russians(Wednesday, BBC4), it was compelling to watch her being as plain and uninteresting as she could, giving not the slightest intimation of the Machiavellian Mata Hari lurking behind the beige exterior. Atkins couldn’t have done it better.

To read the best of AA Gill's television reviews, go to timesonline.co.uk/gill

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