Many of my friends find the entire idea of festivals abhorrent. It’s not that they’re on some appalled-of-Purley Daily Mail campaign to put a stop to them, just that the idea of staying under canvas for a few days in a field full of noisiness is their idea of Hell. Especially if the weather is inclement. Many of them would also find the pie-eyed utopian warbling, with which this film is entirely packed, irritating in the extreme, irrelevant delusional blather in our world of international debt crisis and cynical political shenanigans.

Once in a blue moon, the judges would seem to have got it wrong.  I can think only of 2001, when stunning Latvian mezzo Elina Garanča failed to win the coveted goblet but has since gone on to deserved fame as one of the top half-dozen singers on the international stage today. This year, though, it was business as usual: the panel lit up by a gracious Dame Kiri, three of the singers who didn’t make it to the final,sound telly opera trouper Mary King and I all agreed that regal American with a twinkle Jamie Barton deserved the palm.

You may have thought BBC sitcoms had sunk to the depths with Ben Elton's The Wright Way, but Quick Cuts is giving it a run for its money. The opening episode of a three-part series started last night and, while I'm not a betting woman, I'll vouchsafe Quick Cuts won't get a full run. Or should it do so, I may have to ask for my licence fee back.

I bought a new car recently, but by the end of The Route Masters (***) I was feeling a powerful inclination to sell it. The film would have rung a masochistic bell with anybody accustomed to trying to travel round London on a regular basis, and the soundbite claiming that the average speed of the city's rush hour traffic is 9mph sounded like a wild exaggeration.

In recent times, the Middle Ages have been ghettoised on those channels you watch in pubs. Game of Thrones, and anything by Regius Professor of bunkum Ken Follett, are history laid on for people who don’t give a toss about history. You know, the snorey stuff about canon law and tithe barns. For those who prefer their medieval high jinks only semi-faked, The White Queen prances into one’s purview on a white liveried steed. Its aim is to show a clean pair of hooves to all that oikish pillaging and plotting which have lately steamed up the nation’s undergarments.

Being a woman soldier in the Afghan army must rate among the world’s “least wanted” jobs, if only 14 applicants came forward for 150 places in the year’s intake covered in Afghan Army Girls. It apparently took a year’s negotiations to get a single camera allowed in to follow them over their six months' training, and even then some on the course insisted on having their faces blanked (understandable, when the Taliban threaten retaliation).

It’s been quite a week for surveillance. And no, that doesn’t mean the NSA and whatever’s happening in Hong Kong. You can bet the week's viewing figures that the majority of Britain’s households, particularly those in the triple-F category – meaning, feline-focused families – will have been more preoccupied with Horizon’s investigation into what exactly goes on when that flap goes up, The Secret Life of the Cat.

The idea of writing nine 30-minute dramas (or more like 26 minutes when you take the ads out) about the thrills and calamities of first-dating might have been asking for trouble, but seems to be working out unexpectedly well so far. The crafty part about the concept (dreamed up by Bryan Skins Elsley) is that instead of having to explain the setup and establish the characters' relationships, you just watch two strangers starting the process from scratch, so they're doing the job for you.

Nobody said it was easy being an infant prodigy. Take Hugo, ranked in the top 0.4 percent of the population. He knows everything there is to know about train engines, train stations, rail networks etc, has them committed to his photographic memory. At 10 he is, basically, on some sort of spectrum, and he knows that too. “This is my brother Oscar,” he said. “He’s a more normal child.”

In the end, it was always going to come down to the last episode whether The Fall was powerful female-driven drama or, to quote another writer for theartsdesk, “misogynistic torture porn”. That conclusion, however, was as elusive as the ending of Allan Cubitt’s thriller; cunningly set up as if to strongarm BBC Two into a second series before the announcement was made.