Following the success of its screen version of Michael Connelly’s veteran detective Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver, Prime Video aims to make lightning strike twice by televising Connelly’s series of Renée Ballard books. Like Bosch, Ballard works for the LAPD, but has been demoted from the Robbery-Homicide division after reporting a sexual assault by her supervisor, Robert Olivas.

As a sometime writer of Poirot, Sherlock and Christmas ghost stories, Mark Gatiss is no stranger to enigmatic crimes and bizarre occurrences set in carefully-recreated versions of the past. He revisits similar themes in Bookish, his new series about a second-hand bookseller in post-World War Two London who is evidently concealing some hidden depths.

A thirtysomething American woman with wavering self-confidence, a tendency to talk too much and a longing for married bliss with Mr Darcy at his gorgeous country pile tries to reset her life post-breakup with a grown-up new job in London. Welcome to Bridget Jones country as seen through the lens of New Yorker Lena Dunham. 

A mixture of legal drama, medical mystery and psychological thriller with creepy supernatural overtones, Insomnia sometimes seems to be trying to cram too much in, but it’s well worth sticking with it to the end to reap the full benefits. Not the least of its strengths are its classy production values and an excellent all-round cast, with Vicky McClure in the lead role of high-flying City lawyer Emma Averill, Leanne Best as her sister Phoebe, and Lyndsey Marshal throwing any number of flies into the ointment as Caroline Mitchell.

“Bob’s not the kind of guy you can say no to,” said Sting, reminiscing about the origins of 1984’s Band Aid charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. “He’s persistent.”

Some world champion racing drivers make it look effortless, but it was never that way for Damon Hill. His path to the championship he won in 1996 had been fraught with difficulties, including not just his increasingly ill-tempered on-track battle with Michael Schumacher, but also the sometimes less-than-wholehearted support he received from the Williams team. Indeed, the team had already announced they were replacing him before he won the 1996 title.

If somebody submitted a treatment for a new costume drama series set in the 1930s in which not just one but two fictitious sisters from a fading aristocratic family pair off with leading fascists, while the cousin warning them off these liaisons is a future British PM, the pitch meeting probably wouldn’t last that long. 

With Brad Pitt’s much-trumpeted F1 movie about to screech noisily into the multiplexes, it’s not a bad time to be reminded of the career of one of the sport’s indisputable greats. Alain Prost doesn’t seem too fussed about bigging himself up on social media or reality TV (L’Île d’Amour perhaps), but he’s the only French racing driver to have won the Formula One world championship, a feat he accomplished four times between 1985 and 1993.

Edith Wharton hadn’t finished her novel, The Buccaneers, when she died in 1937, but it was completed in 1993 by Marion Mainwaring. The result was not considered an unalloyed triumph, but there was certainly a lot more Edith Wharton in it than you’ll find in Apple TV+’s dramatisation.

The first series of The Gold in 2023 was received rapturously, though apparently it only told one half of the story of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow airport. Now screenwriter Neil Forsyth has returned to the scene of the crime to reveal what happened – or might have happened, since there’s a fair bit of artistic licence at play here – to the missing portion of the £26 million quid’s worth of stolen gold.