Seven shows to watch on TV this week

Never has sticking a bun in the oven seemed like such fun: The Great British Bake Off (BBC One, Wednesday, 8pm) is back. Cancel all your other plans; for the next 11 weeks, Wednesday night is Mel and Sue time. Eyebrows will be arched. Pastry will be pounded. Blood will be spilled. And all in the name of getting on the good side of Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood. Yes we know there is an Irish version, but it's fair to say that this is the only thing the British can do better than us.

Netflix has just released its latest homegrown series: Wet Hot American Summer is an eight-part series set in 1981 that takes place at a summer camp and drips with nostalgia. It's the prequel to a film that no one seems to have watched, and reunites that film's original cast, which includes Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper, Lake Bell, Michael Cera, Chris Pine, Jason Schwartzman, Kristen Wiig, "Weird Al" Yankovic and half the now-unemployed cast of Mad Men. It's American Pie-style humour hasn't exactly toasted our marshmallows but have a nibble for yourself.

In Louis Theroux: Transgender Kids (RTE2, Monday 9.50pm), the always interesting presenter travels to San Francisco and spends time with children who are undergoing gender-reassignment surgery. Children as young as three can show signs of rejecting the gender they were assigned at birth, leaving parents with a difficult dilemma - do they start transitioning a child who is still developing their own identity or do they wait and risk making the change once their body has gone through the transformations of puberty?

The latest jawdropping nature documentary from the BBC focuses on Atlantic: the Wildest Ocean on Earth (BBC Two, Thursdays, 9pm). We've already had one brilliant part, that left us in floods of tears as a humpback whale mother attempted to cross the ocean with her new calf (spoiler alert: they survived!). This week's episode looks at the vast underwater mountains of the south Atlantic, and the huge pods of dolphins, massive penguin colonies and packs of marine mammals and other extraordinary creatures that live there. Local interest in the show comes in the form of its narrator: Cillian Murphy.

Fans of the excellent Ripper Street (BBC1, Friday, 9pm) which is filmed in Dublin, may have missed out on Series 2 when it made the unexpected move to Amazon Prime's streaming service, but good news - it's back home on BBC. The eight-episode series started again last Friday. Expect another star turn from underrated Monaghan actress Charlene McKenna as the resourceful Rose Erskine.

After being paralysed in a car crash, ex-Royal Marine Arthur Williams took up flying. In Flying to the Ends of the Earth (Monday, Channel 4, 8pm) he flies to some of the world's most dangerous landing strips, meets the people who live there, and visits some of the planet's most remote and stunning wildernesses, which are only accessible by tiny plane. Those with vertigo may want to look elsewhere for their entertainment.

Did you miss the final episode of Humans last night (Channel 4)? Oh you silly goose. The brilliant series, about living with utterly lifelike robots, has been the best new thing on telly in quite some time. You can catch up on the entire, whipsmart series over on channel4.com right now. Park yourself on the couch stat.