The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a stunning achievement

He’s played when young by Jacob Elordi (Saltburn, Euphoria) and by Ciarán Hinds when older and haunted by memories of his time as a Japanese prisoner of war in Thailand during the second world war. There he was forced to labour on the notorious Burma Railway, known as the Death Railway.

It claimed as many as 90,000 civilian lives, as well as an estimated 16,000 PoWs, of whom about 2,800 were Australian. The drama doesn’t spare viewers the suffering, starvation and brutality. In some ways, it has the instincts of a literary-minded slasher movie, the horrors of war rendered in shock edits and scenes of pitiless violence: a gangrenous leg sawn off without anaesthetic, a spitting bonfire of emaciated, disease-ridden bodies. One prisoner is beheaded with a sword. Another is beaten to death in one of the most savage sequences I’ve ever seen.

The younger Evans inhabits two of the drama’s three timelines. We see him as a struggling PoW camp doctor, and in Tasmania before he leaves for the war, musing on the Roman poet Catullus and engaged to a good match, but erotically obsessed with the young wife of his uncle (Odessa Young and Simon Bakerrespectively).

In the third timeline, set in 1980s Sydney, Hinds’s Evans is an eminent and sometimes problematic surgeon who coldly cheats on his wife, Ella (Heather Mitchell). He is the author of a book about his wartime experiences and his survivor’s guilt has curdled into self-loathing. If the older Evans carries his trauma like a boulder, it is one that has crushed others. Ella says: “You know the worst thing you did to me, Dorrigo ? You made me hard.”.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North does not flesh out its Japanese characters enough, though there are references to allied hypocrisy (“Do you not think your empire was built on death?”) and the atomic bomb atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The opening episode verges on ponderous, and the chronological jumps and murky filming style can be off-putting. But stay with it and you’re rewarded with a raw, poetic study of lifelong psychological scar tissue. Both Hinds and Elordi give spectacular performances: you sense the DNA of the same character moving through time. A stunning achievement.

On Channel 4, there’s Victoria Silver’s documentary 1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story. Blue – born Tia Billinger, aged 26 and from Derbyshire – gave up her day job to earn more than £1m a month as one of the foremost adult content creators on the controversial subscription platform OnlyFans.

Her “USP”, as she terms it –like a porn-peddling candidate on The Apprentice – is allowing ordinary people to have sex with her (or “rearrange her insides”), so she can film and monetise it. After trawling for “barely legal” 18-year-olds outside Nottingham Trent University last year, she was castigated as a predator. She also has a “kink” for bumper-pack [her word again?] gangbangs.

In January, she made headlines when she slept with the thousand men of the documentary’s title (1,057, to be precise) in 12 hours. This “world record” is shown. Naked men, who are provided with free balaclavas to spare their blushes – if not ours – trudge in line in socked feet to “rail” Blue, who encourages the first through the door with language too explicit to repeat here.

The timing means they have fewer than 40 seconds each with her; many see her in groups. Halfway through, she refuels with a doughnut. The floor becomes littered with discarded condoms, which she lies in, performing dead-eyed snow angels for the camera.

Filming over several months,Silver tries to understand the motivations behind these stunts, but any queries about feminism or Blue’s mental health are dismissed as pearl-clutching: “I’m just not emotional. I can very much control my emotions.”

Blue is platinum-haired, tanned and mega-groomed. Her team hails her as a marketing genius. Initially, a husband is around, but then they split up. Her mother supports her career choice and is on the payroll. Fielding death threats, Blue does jigsaws to relax. “My goal is to earn £5m a month and be the biggest porn star in the world,” she says.

Clutching my own pearls, I suspect that what Blue is intent on framing as uber-sex-positivity can be darker. A “school”-themed gangbang she organises with a mixed-sex group, including young, nervous female content creators (who say they’ve never filmed sex with other people) looks grim. She is deliberately provocative, saying she loves seeing men at gangbangs wearing wedding rings. In the relentless pressure to stay relevant, some chinks start to appear in Blue’s armour: a particularly intense livestream gangbang with professional porn stars seems to fluster her far more than the 1,000-men stunt.

OnlyFans ends up permanently banning Blue for a “petting zoo” scheme, where she would be tied up in a glass box like an animal. Ever the quick-thinking businesswoman, she arranges to go to Romania to visit influencer Andrew Tate, who is still facing rape and human trafficking charges, which he denies. She also moves her wares to another subscription-based site, Fansly. Whatever happens next for Blue, there’s no doubting the recording light will be on.

Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army (BBC Two) is Ellena Wood’s two-part docuseries on the radical Christian community originally known as the Jesus Fellowship that sprang up in Northamptonshire in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was led by Noel Stanton, who died in 2009, and is shown here orating on sexual abstinence: “We give our genitals to Jesus!” Initially following an Americanised religious blueprint of public baptism and catharsis, the community boasted about 3,500 members at its peak, with millions of pounds pouring in.

Of course, it turned into an unholy mess of darkness, hysteria, female subjugation and child sexual abuse, with as many as one in six children affected (including allegations against Stanton). The Jesus Army disbanded in 2019, with few court convictions won, and with litigation and compensation issues outstanding. Survivors, some born into the community, are shown grouping together trying to make sense of what happened to them. One wonders if that is possible.

Chief of War

(Apple TV+)

Bold drama about the battles for the unification of Hawaii in the 18th century. Jason Momoa (Game of Thrones) stars.

Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time

(Disney+)

Compelling docuseries two decades on from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in the New Orleans area. Systemic failures and slanted media coverage meant black citizens were let down and misrepresented.

Destination X

(BBC One)

Diverting if overcomplicated new reality show presented by Rob Brydon. Contestants are ferried around in coaches to work out where they are in Europe. It’s The Traitors meets Coach Trip with a pinch of Race Across the World.

Photographs by BBC/Curio Pictures/Sony Pictures Television