Of all the ways in which the BBC has chosen to mark the 50th anniversary of one of its most celebrated exports, surely this (other than the obvious) was the most anticipated: a feature-length retelling of the origin story of Doctor Who, written and executive produced by some of the same names behind the show’s current run.

No one seemed quite sure whether it’s a journey of 60 miles or 40 from Harrogate to Halifax, but we’re going to be seeing a lot of the M62 in this second series of Last Tango in Halifax. It’s a journey in more senses than one, leading from the genteel prosperity of the former, where you’re expecting arrivals from an Ayckbourn or a Bennett play any moment, to a rural farm outside the latter, where the grim atmosphere rather resembles The Village (okay, pushing that a bit).

No one ever said putting on a show was easy, least of all the names (a lot of them famous, quite a few not) on compulsively watchable view in The Sound of Musicals. Channel 4's reality-TV probe into the world of art, commerce, and high kicks is sure to be catnip to theatre folk the world over, even if the sight of Broadway actor-turned-Chichester "star" Christopher Fitzgerald walking his tentative way across a tightrope in his role as PT Barnum soon becomes a visual metaphor for the performer's ever-precarious chosen profession.

How much time does anyone want to spend in the company of Kim Philby? BBC Four’s Storyville allotted him 75 minutes, which isn’t much to tell the story of a third man with two paymasters and four wives. And yet this portrait somehow contrived to outstay its welcome. This is not to come over all huffy Heffer about betrayal. It’s just that hunting for the real Philby is like wandering around a maze uncertain if you’re looking for the entrance or the exit.

Sidse Babett Knudsen, alias the absurdly photogenic Danish Statsminister Birgitte Nyborg, provoked gasps at the Nordicana festival in London last June when she revealed that she was no longer Prime Minister in series three. And indeed, as the curtain rose on episode one, we could see that she was not.

Today’s special preview of the impending 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who finally filled in some of what happened in the gap between Paul McGann’s 1996 made-for-TV movie and the show’s 2005 televisual regeneration (Big Finish audios notwithstanding, obviously). So it was appropriate that today’s other Who-related event, a one-off tie-in documentary fronted by Professor Brian Cox, began by doing its best to bridge the gap between its presenter’s time in 90s dance-pop band D:Ream and his own unlikely regeneration as one of TV science’s most famous personalities.

There are plenty of aspects of Doctor Who worth examining through a scientific lensPersonally, I’d happily watch an hour of back-and-forth between Cox and current Doctor Matt Smith - their short scenes, interspersing the rest of the show’s lecture format, were a joy to watch - but the show had unfortunately promised Proper Science, with the usual celebrity guests, rather than a jaunt in the TARDIS. Thankfully Cox is an engaging lecturer, which seems as good an explanation as any for why the majority of those celebrity guests remained stuck to their seats throughout.

Cox began, as all good lecturers do, by setting out his thesis - by the end of his allotted hour, he wanted to demonstrate whether it was or was not possible to travel in time just like the Doctor. With all of space and time to choose from, his goal was modest - Dr Michael Faraday’s Christmas Lecture on the chemical history of the candle from 1860, given in the same building from which he was addressing his audience. Faraday’s theories popped up again throughout, as did those of Albert Einstein and Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, whose ‘Fermi Paradox’ is the apparent contradiction between the likelihood of the existence of extraterrestrial life and the fact that we on Earth have not yet seen any evidence of said life.

There are plenty of aspects of Doctor Who worth examining through a scientific lens - I for one would love to see a few of those times the Doctor saved the day armed with nothing more than his trusty sonic screwdriver debunked - so it was a bit of a shame that Cox’s lecture focused solely on the big questions: those of time travel and alien life. Though Cox and his volunteers (former Bang Goes the Theory man Dallas Campbell, Charles Dance, Professor Jim Al-Khalili and comedian Rufus Hound) were able to recreate some of the science through simple on-stage experiments, there was no chance that we were going to meet a genuine Martian by the lecture’s end or that Cox would be able to have a cup of tea with his beloved Faraday and be home in time for supper.

By 10pm we had learned that it was theoretically possible to travel into the future, if you didn’t mind a 10-year detour around outer space, that a former pop star with a considerable IQ needs to have LSD jokes explained to him and that, if you were going to throw Rufus Hound out of the universe through a black hole - or at least a convincing picture of one - you’d never actually see him disappear. Whether the rather complex science had stuck was another matter - but it was certainly an interesting, and fun, place to start.

• Doctor Who: The Return of Doctor Mysterio reviewed on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the latest trailer for Dr Who 50th Anniversary celebrations on Saturday 23rd November

Inevitably, an aura of fin-de-siècle gloom hung heavily over this final Poirot. So daunting was the prospect of terminating his 25-year career-defining stint as Belgium's finest (albeit imaginary) export that David Suchet insisted on shooting the last one before the others in the concluding series.

The images really do say it all in Strange Days – Cold War Britain. It’s a style of documentary making which puts archive material in first place, ahead even of presenter Dominic Sandbrook, who’s the sole screen presence here (no interviews, no talking heads). We can only wonder exactly how this challenging mêlée of material came together, but can be sure that archive producer Stuart Robertson had every bit as much input as director Rebecca Templar.

Sometimes TV doesn’t need to be “challenging” or “groundbreaking” to be thoroughly worthwhile. The first episode of Sky Arts' new “…talks music” series saw the familar format of a live, seated interview applied to one of pop music’s highest achievers: Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. TV producer Malcolm Gerrie led proceedings in an attractive theatre in front of an audience of students. Most memorable were some blistering live demonstrations of Buckingham’s craft.

So, another series down and what do we know? First up, until this final episode no one had died either by contractual agreement or Fellowesian godlike decree. We’ve had a rape, an unwanted pregnancy, a near abortion, a mysterious disappearance and a spot of senile dementia. Plus not one but two uppity colonial singers have drifted upstairs. If it weren’t for the vowels and the coat-tails, this could be Emmerdale, tackling urgent social issues in a Yorkshire accent and congratulating itself on the column inches the morning after. Why else all the animal husbandry?