Part autobiography, part industry satire, this hilarious show boasts dazzling dialogue and ace cameos. But surely Ahmed has better things to do than play James Bond?

If I were Riz Ahmed, I would be very up myself too. In the two decades since his screen career began, the actor has won Oscars and Baftas; been cast in a Star Wars film and a Charli xcx video; inspired a metric for Muslim on-screen representation (the Riz Test) and crafted a body of work comprising performances which are both individually excellent and collectively meaningful.

He has done so by combining talent with an unusual willingness to engage with the wider context of what it means to be a brown British person on 21st-century planet Earth. I imagine a certain amount of ego is also necessary to power the whole enterprise. And if so, what of it?

Ahmed superbly tackles race and identity in his hilarious new show Bait, proving the British-Asian actor truly is the best of this country. I’m happy for him, I swear!

Conflicted feelings for me this week, watching Bait, the new comedy created by Riz Ahmed. I started a career in acting shortly after Ahmed, you see. For a decade, I lost every good job going to him. What made it worse was watching all of those projects and realising exactly how good he was. Anyway, I’m going to try to write the rest of this while suppressing Salieri levels of malcontent. Wish me luck.

Bait is the story of an Asian actor, Shah Latif, who finds himself lined up to be the next James Bond. The series covers the internet’s toxic response to the rumours, using it to dive deep into a conversation about racial palatability, Britishness, ambition and authenticity. It’s funny, surreal, provocative and boasts an incredible array of hot young British-Asian actors. Which reminds me, I must rewatch Sliding Doors.

His multi-hyphenate career has made him one of Britain’s most versatile recognisable stars – but hasn’t stopped him facing some seriously awkward moments…

Riz Ahmed was multitasking. It was February in London, and the actor was doing an interview with a men’s magazine en route to collect his kid from school. So far, so starry. “Here’s the reality,” says Ahmed today, palms slamming down hard on the table. “I’m late for the school run. I’m stuck in traffic. I’m meant to be at my laptop, but I’m having to do it on my phone, in my car. I’m double parked on a double yellow line, doing the interview, looking over my shoulder. The traffic warden’s coming, it’s rush hour. He tries to move me along. I try to get out of there while I’m talking on the phone to this guy.”

Distracted, Ahmed hit another car. The driver jumped out of his vehicle, incensed. “He’s like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’” says Ahmed, who had been attempting to continue the interview. “I’m now going off video, like, ‘Oh, my signal’s a bit bad!’ while going on and off mute negotiating car insurance details. On the phone, I’m going, ‘Absolutely, it was just such an honour getting to tell my story with these amazing collaborators,’” he says, his voice lowering an octave and turning smooth.

Timothy Spall and Art Malik co-star in Aneil Karia’s intelligent and stark retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy, set in the world of shady family business

Screenwriter Michael Lesslie and director Aneil Karia have devised a stark and severe new interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; there are transpositions and cuts, some light modernisations, and the text is stripped down a good deal. It’s an austerely challenging reading and incidentally, right about now, nothing could be further from the richly empathetic and redemptive approach of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, about the play’s imagined origins.

The setting is modern London’s world of shady family business and family dysfunction, wedding parties, blandly scheming associates and SUVs speeding through the night-time streets. Hamlet looks here like no one as much as Kendall Roy from TV’s Succession. Riz Ahmed plays the prince, horrified by a ghostly vision of his dead father (Avijit Dutt) who, in a chilling scene, summons him to a bleak urban rooftop to announce he was murdered by his brother Claudius (Art Malik). Claudius now is a hard-faced property speculator who has evicted a tented community of people led by Fortinbras from some prime real estate, and who now intends to marry Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha).

The return of hit bonkbuster Rivals, the horny hockey show taking the world by storm, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer … and Buffy is back! Here’s your complete guide to 2026’s unmissable television

As the writer of conspiracy thriller Utopia and Covid-era relationship drama Together, Dennis Kelly has form for creating darkly perceptive TV drama. This excellent series stars Josh Finan (whose performance in The Responder earned him a Bafta nomination) as Dan, a philosophy teacher with a troubled family past, working in a prison. As he explores issues around freedom, luck and destiny with the inmates, he starts to wonder if he actually belongs behind bars like his abusive father. Soon, his anxieties threaten to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• BBC One, 3 January