TV highlights 19/7/11

The Hour 9pm, BBC2 Firstly, it is not like Mad Men, bar the 1960s office setting. Dominic West, Romola Garai and a frankly awe-inspiring Ben Whishaw are the team behind the BBC's newest current affairs show, The Hour. It eschews that dusty nostalgia and feels like it's fresh out of the box that morning. And the often gruesome subplot is properly thrilling, complete with smooth-shouldered debutantes, trilbys lurking in the shadows and a banger of an opening. Plus there's a timely scene in which a journalist pays a copper for info. Absolute TV perfection. Julia Raeside Falling Skies 9pm, FX History-spouting Prof Mason gets closer to retrieving his alien-augmented son as he leads a band of fighters into hostile territory. There are not one but two quite poorly written moments when carelessness and/or stupidity nearly gets them all killed, but we do get to learn a bit more about our new alien overlords and their weaknesses. There are also good moments as Mason meets up with a doctor who was there when Mrs Mason was killed. While we're getting glimpses of the bigger picture at play, it's the quieter moments that work best here. Phelim O'Neill Britain Through A Lens: The Documentary Film Mob 9pm, BBC4 How did an unlikely bunch of civil servants in sensible shoes spearhead the British documentary movement? For one, as this film shows, these idealists were bound together with the then radical idea of documenting real people doing normal, routine, so-called real things. Between 1929 and 1950, the likes of Humphrey Jennings and John Grierson held a mirror up to the nation and made films (including Coal Face and Listen To Britain) that took up the nitty-gritty of public life in a way that was unheard of in the first half of the 20th century. Brave, poetic and endlessly repeated since. Nosheen Iqbal Twenty Twelve 10pm, BBC2 The BBC4 comedy makes the move to BBC2. There will come a time soon, after the cost is tallied and the results examined, when the 2012 London Olympics will be no laughing matter. Until then, it's fair game. Writer-director John Morton previously helmed the great People Like Us, and here the tone is similar and the standard just as high. Set in the Olympic Delivery Committee, complete with dreadful logo, we meet the excellent cast – Hugh Bonneville, Olivia Coleman, Jessica Hynes, Vincent Franklin – as they prepare to relaunch their website. A terrific start. Phelim O'Neill True Stories: After The Apocalypse 10pm, More4 From the 1950s to the early-90s, Russian nuclear warheads were tested in a part of Kazakhstan named "The Polygon". For the farming community of Semipalatinsk, the tests have wreaked a quiet, generational havoc: it is the cause, they believe, of terrible birth defects in their children. The medical profession is intervening. But by ordering abortions, the suggestion is that the authorities are substituting one inhumane act for another. John Robinson Imagine 10.35pm, BBC1 As last week's Lennon in Limbo film pointed out, Harry Nilsson was the kind of guy you could call when you wanted to go out, and have no idea where you might wake up three days later. This film attempts to probe a bit deeper than that, as a number of surviving intimates – Yoko, Robin Williams, Van Dyke Parks – try to reveal the personality behind the bar tab. For Nilsson, being much-admired by the Beatles was not always a blessing. John Robinson