Capital (BBC1, 9pm)

TOBY Jones is earning the accolade of Britain's best actor, and he gains another chance to shine here as investment banker Roger, who is rubbing his hands with glee over property prices in Pepys Road, South London, suddenly shooting into the multi-million-pound range.

Then postcards start arriving through front doors saying: "We want what you have". These anonymous messages provide a mystery and forces neighbours who hardly know each other to reveal background details of love, loss, fear, greed, fortune and envy.

Executive producers Derek Wax and Peter Bowker have adapted John Lanchester's critically-acclaimed book of the same name to bring us Roger and spendthrift wife Arabella (Rachael Stirling), Polish builder Bogdan (Radoslaw Kaim), Quentina, the Zimbabwean PhD working as a traffic warden (Wunmi Mosaku), newsagent Ahmed (Adeel Akhtar) and OAP Petunia (Gemma Jones), who wants to die in the house in which she was born.

Jones says of working with the cast: "It was a bit like actually living on Pepys Road. You know what some people are doing and you don’t know what other people are doing, some people you know very well and some people you get to know better over time. So in that way the form matched the content.

"Roger isn’t an evil banker, he’s a slightly complacent banker. He’s become used to a certain way of life and has a self-imposed pressure to live that way. He spends a lot of money on things that other people don’t spend money on – for example fixtures and fittings – but that is normal to him and his wife. He is not totally in charge of his life or his work."

He was attracted to the part because he was playing a very well-educated, functioning human being on one level, who has obeyed the rules and earned a lot of money, but on another level something is happening to him internally that he doesn’t have the language to articulate.

"It’s a creeping dissatisfaction, a creeping sense of loss and directionlessness. He has no way of expressing that or even understanding it himself. He’s not self-reflective in that way and lives with someone who seems to be totally unself-reflective too," says Jones.

The actor identifies with his character because he has two children and his work takes him away from home a lot. "I can identify with the challenge in life of the transition of going from the work space to the domestic space. Derek Wax arranged for me to go and have a meeting with a banker in the city and that was invaluable. He was in charge of handing out the bonuses so had seen some of the more wayward reactions of bankers, who live and die by the numbers they make, when they have been told the bonus that has been settled on. He was also highly articulate about the context in which banking takes place.

"I thought it was interesting that for all of the opulence and brilliant design in these offices, they are really sterile environments. There’s a monastic and slightly sinister silence with this huge traffic of vast sums of money surrounding everything."

Emergency! Trains v Weather (ITV, Regions Vary)

WE'VE all heard it – train delayed due to leaves on line, or some other explanation that sounds like nonsense to the commuters desperately trying to either get to work on time, or get home again. This documentary offers an insight into the other side of the coin – we get to see the rail workers desperately trying to keep Britain's services operating during bad weather. It takes an army of engineers and maintenance teams to get everything on track (pardon the pun) and prevent the delays that cause misery to millions. There's a chance to see how the latest technology and old-fashioned hard graft are used to tackle floods, hurricane force winds and six-foot snow drifts. Oh yes, and those pesky leaves, of course.

Viv Hardwick