Devised and written by John Ridley, the Oscar-winning writer of 12 Years a Slave, Guerrilla (Sky Atlantic) takes us back to London, 1971. The story is set among a group of black activists agitating against racism and police brutality, and the city is portrayed as a shabby, smouldering dystopia about to erupt into apocalyptic violence.

In the closing credits of Acorn Antiques, wobbling diagonally across the screen, it says the part of Berta was taken by “Victoria Woods”. Has there ever been a lovelier, truer typo? There was only one Victoria Wood, and yet she seemed somehow to be plural. She wrote and performed sketches and sitcom, songs and stand-up, musicals and drama. She directed, she produced.

Sunshine, sex and oodles of style: Vera (ITV) has no truck with any of them and is therefore unusual among Sunday evening dramas. There’s no escaping its mission to prove it’s grimy up north.

The first series of The Last Kingdom in 2015 kicked off with a blockbuster episode which managed to encompass savage violence, dynastic rivalry and a speedy tour of the state of Britain in the ninth century, while allowing the central protagonist, Uhtred, to grow from boy to man. It was a virtuoso feat, and one which the opener of series two couldn’t quite repeat.

Mary Magdalene: Art's Scarlet Woman (BBC Four) is, says art critic Waldemar Januszczak, a film about a woman who probably never existed. "So why,” he asks, “are we so obsessed with her?” He delivers the answer in breathy, lugubrious tones as if sharing a dirty secret. The story, he says, is “sweaty, sensuous and naughty... For 2,000 years we’ve been fantasising about this most alluring and intoxicating presence.”

It has been a long, long time since Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais wrote a new sitcom; in their heyday they created The Likely Lads and its sequel, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, all of which have become classics of the genre. The duo went to live in Los Angeles some decades ago to work in both film and TV, but now return with a new sitcom, set in the fictional but contemporary court of King Henry IX.

In the beginning it was about good catastrophes. A shotgun pregnancy after a hot hook-up. A dysfunctional transatlantic romance in which opposites attract. The boredom of looking after babies. The boredom of being a wage slave. Catastrophe was created out of an unlikely sitcom scenario that managed somehow to stay funny through two series on Channel 4.

Anyone with even a passing interest in surrealism should watch Philippa Perry finding out How to Be a Surrealist and, in the process, creating an exhilarating and richly informative BBC Four film. In October 1924 the Surrealists opened an office in Paris called the Bureau of Surrealist Research and invited people to drop in to recount their dreams.

Like many first novels, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall has a strong whiff of autobiography. It is a revenge comedy in which Waugh – like Kingsley Amis after him in Lucky Jim – transmutes his miserable experiences of teaching in Wales into savage farce.

We like to think of Georgian England as a wellspring of elegance: the Chippendale chair and the Wedgwood teapot, the landscaped vista and the neoclassical townhouse. But, as subversively embodied in the mock heroic couplet, the seemly Age of Reason had a seamy underbelly. There was order, but also ordure.