TV Preview, The Big Family Cooking Showdown (BBC2, Tuesday 8pm): Tasty or what?

Plus: MasterChef Australia (W, Monday 7pm), Quacks (BBC2, Tuesday 10pm), North Korea: Murder in the Family (BBC2, Sunday 9pm), Dangerous Borders: a Journey across India and Pakistan (BBC2, Monday 9pm), Trust Me (BBC1, Tuesday 9pm), The Windsors (Channel 4, Wednesday 10pm)

Nadiya Hussain and Zoe Ball host what the BBC hope to be Bake Off’s replacement (BBC)

I guess there’s no doubt that the TV highlight of the week is bound to be The Big Family Cooking Showdown. A bit more of a mouthful than the Great British Bake Off, but is it going to be as tasty, for the BBC and its viewers alike? Well, it runs along the same lines of every other knockout food-based contest of recent times, which is to say we have “ordinary” cooks being judged by professionals and celebs.

Broadly speaking, then, not so different to GBBO, and indeed many other cookery shows involving the general public. What’s needed, as with the GBBO or some extra-special cake or something, is an X factor, by which I mean Simon Cowell. Thus, the formula for TBFCS is GBBO winner Nadiya Hussain, plus Zoe Ball as presenters, plus Rosemary Shrager and Giorgio Locatelli as judges, and 16 families doing the heavy lifting on and off the hobs. I confess to being an exceptionally poor judge of such shows, as the only part of this that will appeal to me is the challenge to create a meal for four for £10. Otherwise, as with what is now Channel 4’s GBBO, the whole foodie phenomenon fails to lift my soufflé. For traditionalists who require relatively little novelty to sate their viewing palate there is also MasterChef Australia, which is fairly self-descriptive I think. It’s more fun than the British version, and has more challenges in it, and of course the vowels sound different.

Much more to my taste is Quacks, a sort of cross between the Saw movie franchise, Casualty and Blackadder. The material here sounds a little unpromising – mid-Victorian era surgery before the arrival of proper anaesthetics or Dr Lister’s efficacious antiseptic techniques. Still, humour can spring from the most unlikely of places (like Brexit or Kim Jong-un or Ed Sheeran). The cast and moody photography help the scripts of James Wood (Rev, Rise and Fall) make the right incisions on our sensibilities. Rory Kinnear, fast becoming an even bigger national treasure than his late father Roy, is the lead quack and speed surgeon, Robert. Based loosely on the real-life celeb physicians of the mid-19th century who could command celebrity status, breathless coverage in the popular press and a paying audience for their grotesque experimentations, Kinnear is supported most ably by Matthew Baynton, Tom Basden and Rupert Everett (as psychiatrist, dentist and boss respectively), plus Lydia Leonard as the Kinnear character’s neglected wife, left in the cruel position of being super-libidinous in the super-repressed Victorian era. You need not be familiar with phrenology to appreciate the effects of such a complaint upon on a young woman in otherwise robust health, and the young gentlemen who find themselves in her orbit.

North Korea: Murder in the Family retells the still phantasmagoric story of the assassination of King Jong-un’s happy go lucky (though not in the end quite lucky enough) half-brother King Jong-nam, in February. This Kim was the eldest son of Kim Jong-il, and was once the crown prince, but fell spectacularly from favour when he was caught visiting the Japanese branch of Disneyland in 2001: not a very Stalinist thing to do. Loafing about in exile in the gambling paradise of Macau, nominally under the protection of the Chinese authorities, the only harm Kim Jong-nam did was to give the occasional mouthy impromptu interview with local media. That, however, and a perceived closeness to Beijing, planted the suspicion that he could be dropped onto the North Korean throne as a Chinese/American puppet in the event of some regime change. All well and good, but the truly weird and medieval bit is that his own half-brother should sanction his murder in plain sight at Kuala Lumpur airport. A small but valuable insight into the ruthless mind of the biggest threat to world peace today, Kim Jong-un. Let’s hope we survive long enough to see the show.

Less terrifying a threat to global peace than once they were, the tensions between India and Pakistan nonetheless persist some seven decades after the independence from Britain, and subsequent partition, ethnic cleansing and periodic wars. Both nuclear powers, they are perhaps proof of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction in avoiding war, or evidence that the world is less safe with WMDs in the hands of rickety regimes, or indeed both of those propositions. Dangerous Borders: a Journey across India and Pakistan sees British Asians Babita Sharma and Adnan Sarwar traverse the 1,800-mile border, with the mix of detachment and empathy that their heritage would suggest.

Trust Me has gained an unusual amount of interest because of its star, Jodie Whittaker, the new Doctor Who, and I’m not sure that this show is the best advertisement for her talents, based as it is on a slightly stretched set of assumptions about how easy it is to adopt a new identity in the paranoiac internet age. Still, it is moving closer to reality with every scene, so maybe worth watching for more than the curiosity value of wondering how the new Doctor will manage to take on the tough humanoid Sontarans, which, although set in Scotland, Trust Me offers few clues about.

Last, we must bid a right royal farewell to The Windsors, Channel 4’s brilliantly executed satire on the royal family and the entire phenomenon of hereditary monarchy. This ancient institution has a hold on us that is even greater than TV cookery shows, and just as difficult to explain. The Windsors at least asks a few playfully subversive questions about the point of the whole damn circus. I think the time has come for a satirical sit com about a TV cookery show. Meantime, enjoy their take on Donald Trump, a living work of self-parody.