There's nothing like a dame, as any panto fan knows. Michael Grade's enjoyable history of the pantomime Dame was shot through with affection as well as a deep knowledge of the subject, as befits a member of one of variety's most influential families and someone who fell in love with the artform at his first pantomime, in which his aunt Kathy was performing as principal boy, when he was just a young lad.

Plaudits to ITV for their recent campaign of new drama, even if the results have been patchy. The best ones have been well worth persevering with, and The Bletchley Circle and Tony Marchant's Leaving have wedged themselves most firmly in the mind.

Of all the festive institutions, the Christmas No 1 holds a special place in my heart. I was one of those kids who, over the month of December, would carefully plot which CD single I’d be pledging my allegiance to (usually not the ultimate winner, apart from that one year Gary Jules’s cover of “Mad World”, from the Donnie Darko soundtrack, fluked it).

They should use the whole Yeats line: "A terrible beauty is born". The programme, A Beauty is Born, being terrible, I mean, rather than the Beauty, which is Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, his latest dance work, which isn't terrible at all, just a mite disappointing. And it strives a great deal higher and with more aim to stimulate than Alan Yentob did in this stock documentary from the BBC's flagship arts strand. Is Yentob the most uninterested specialist presenter on TV?

Splendid summer, cataclysmic autumn. In the last six months, the BBC has tested to the limits the meaning of the phrase “good in parts”. The people at the top of the Corporation – and by March there’ll be a fourth rump in the DG’s hot seat within seven months – will have been looking forward to this seasonal beanfeast with more than usual avidity. There being no journalistic scoops to botch, no skeletons in the cupboard, no Panorama waiting in the wings – and for once no pictures to buy in from Sky - here was a chance for the BBC to cut a few shapes.

I hope it isn't giving too much away for iPlayer catcher-uppers to say that in the end Sarah Lund never did get that undemanding desk job. Instead, the third outing for this ferociously gripping Danish series dragged us screaming and biting our nails right down to the wire, and managed to reach a conclusion simultaneously shocking and saddening yet, in a way, satisfying too.

When the first series of The Hour aired last year, there was a lot of excitable talk about how it was the "British Mad Men". Having sat through series two, I've concluded that in fact it's the British version of Pan Am, that bizarrely idiotic airline series where all the air hostesses were covert operatives for the CIA, and visits to exotic international locations were achieved using plywood props and big photographs of famous landmarks.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian in a hurry - as well he might be when there’s a whole millennium to fit into an hour. A year ago we had his three-parter Jerusalem - The Making of a Holy City, now we’re well into Rome - A History of The Eternal City: no mean feat, given that these are major, impeccably researched and made projects. At least there’s no need for a costume change: Montefiore is back in his panama and chinos, outfit of choice for summer filming that lends him an almost Forsterian élan.

The singer-songwriter Jesse Malin opens one of his songs with a monologue about a trip to Russia. Fresh out of a relationship, and invited by the gypsy punk troupe Gogol Bordello to open their tour of the country, he looked forward to seeing Red Square and spending time in a different world. He was disappointed, however, when the first things he saw there were a McDonald’s, a Starbucks and a Subway.

When watching an adaptation there are times when it's better to have no acquaintance with the original. That certainly goes for thrillers, in which the reveal is all, so it is with considerable smugness that one brandishes one’s ignorance of The Poison Tree. Wiki advises that it is a bestselling psychological thriller which has floated the boat of the likes of Richard and Judy and their estimable book club. And that author Erin Kelly has filched the title from one of Blake’s Songs of Experience. Whereafter similarities with romantic poetry cease.