The arts are in a bit of a state just now. Okay, we all knew that. The money that was there in the past - and where it was coming from - just isn’t the same any more. Finding a new way of doing things is the buzz. Looking outside the box.

Television is a regular prison visitor. You can’t keep Louis Theroux out of the grimmest Stateside penitentiaries, the drama departments drop in now and then for a stretch inside – most recently in Prisoner’s Wives. And then there’s ITV. A couple of years ago it reported from Wormwood Scrubs to find out how the prison system was coping in Brown’s Britain. It wasn’t the prettiest sight. The channel turns its attention to Aylesbury, a young offender institution heaving with the sort of hoodies the Prime Minister may not after watching this first episode feel quite so inclined to hug.

It was the moment when we learned that Sergeant Nick Brody really had been converted into an Islamist agent that the spring went out of Homeland's step. Complicit doesn't make the same mistake. Skilfully spun out over its movie-length span, it's a probing examination of the ambiguities and uncertainties that bedevil intelligence work. It won't make you sleep any easier at night.

Not a bad idea for a series, even if it is a tiny bit Boardwalk Empire Goes to Nevada. In short: whoosh back to the early Sixties and poke about in the wild and lawless underbelly of Las Vegas, a city awash with debauchery and corruption and under the thumb of the Mob. Better still, the show was created by Nicholas Pilleggi, screenwriter for Martin Scorsese's gangster flicks Goodfellas and Casino.

As Julian Lloyd Webber combatively suggests of certain strands of 20^th-century music: “Let’s make a noise no one likes. If the audience likes it, you have failed as a composer.” In general, though, the first programme in this welcome three-part series is if anything too measured and respectful in guiding us through the labyrinths of 20th-century music – from Debussy to Richard Strauss (relatively easy on the ears) via the tougher, spikier Schoenberg and Webern.

Is Charlie Brooker a bit of a soppy old traditionalist at heart? In Black Mirror, our tuned-in, switched-on, networked-up society sits for its portrait. It’s never a pretty sight. Brooker’s vision of the near future, or the alternative present, is Swiftian in its modest savagery. There was a surprise in last night’s second-series opener - with Brooker, there always is – and on this occasion it was to do with the nature of the comedy. There wasn't any. Its place was taken by the dead hollow of real grief.

I wonder if ITV ever imagined this Inspector Morse spin-off would last seven series? The opening pair of episodes in this valedictory season of Lewis still clocked over eight million viewers, though the numbers have subsided a bit since. Future one-off specials have not been ruled out.

A lot has happened since uncompromising French cop drama Spiral was last on our TV screens in May 2011. More of continental Europe has arrived. Attention has shifted northwards to Denmark for The Killing and Borgen. Sweden’s Wallander and Sebastian Bergman were never far. The Bridge closed the gap between both countries. French contender Braquo threw down the gauntlet too, but it was never going to steal Spiral’s thunder as it was just too cartoony, too brutal to clench to your bosom.

The BBC has suddenly noticed that there used to be these really brilliant things called "albums", and now they're going out of style and out of date. Hence they're holding an Albums Season in all media (Danny Baker's Great Album Showdown, Steve Wright's Album Factoids, Johnny Walker's Long Players and many, many more). 

Usually that “similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” note at the end of a broadcast is a mere formality - but I can’t have been the only person to react with a start when a trio of shady record company execs referred to Juliette Barnes, Hayden Panettiere’s perky blonde future of country music, as “the number one crossover artist in the country”.