Nigel Farndale on the week's television: Five Go to Rehab, Secret State and Churchill's Desert Campaign: the Road to El Alamein The BBC equivalent of underselling such fare is to put it out on BBC Four, as it did with historian David Reynolds's 1942 and Hitler's Soft Underbelly. Having enjoyed that a couple of weeks ago, I wasn't sure what Jonathan Dimbleby, not hitherto known for his military history, could add to Churchill's Desert Campaign: the Road to El Alamein (Monday, BBC Two). Well, depth, it seemed. This was the first of three episodes and I liked his way of talking off the cuff to camera from the locations, which went from North Africa to Washington to the Wolf's Lair in Poland. He had an engaging and animated style and conveyed well the tensions between Churchill and his generals, giving a strong sense of the chemistry between them, or lack of it. He didn't mention it in the first episode, though he might in later ones, but his father, the legendary broadcaster Richard Dimbleby, had covered the battle as a war correspondent. This is a personal journey for him, then. It showed in his passion for the subject. The "update" of 1988"s Bafta-winning A Very British Coup, Secret State (Wednesday, Channel 4) got off to a promising start, given gravitas by Gabriel Byrne's low-temperature performance as the deputy prime minister. With political thrillers there is always a danger they will slip into self-parody, and, for a moment, the casting of Sylvestra Le Touzel as Byrne's political "frenemy" made it look like that was where it was heading (she has a cameo playing a similarly hard-nosed minister in The Thick of It). But no, the tone was the right side of plausible and the pace was pleasingly measured, and both were down to Byrne as the calm centre of the drama. As Charles Dance, who played his languid chief whip, noted: "You give off stability." Comparisons with State of Play and Edge of Darkness are not unjustified. It involved a government cover up of a disaster caused by an American-owned petrochemical company exploding on Teesside. Who was in the pocket of whom? There is always a glamorous investigative journalist in these things (all journalists are glamorous, it's a well-known fact - look around any newspaper office). This one, played by Gina McKee, inspired the best lines, spoken at GCHQ. The Americans want to tap her phone. Is that the Americans at MI5, or the Americans at MI6?