The eminence grise behind Touch is Tim Kring, who also devised Heroes, and it shows. Heroes was about a network of people with paranormal or superhuman powers, and so is Touch. In this case, we find ourselves in a universe which is underpinned by numerical patterns and mathematical probabilities. Only a select handful of humans can discern this astounding cosmic architecture and join the astral dots, one of them being Jacob "Jake" Bohm.

If you’re one of those readers who likes to believe that a novelist’s work and the life he leads have little or nothing to do with one another, then I trust you were watching last night’s Arena: The Dreams of William Golding.

This programme wants to challenge certain stereotypes around English identity. It wants to challenge the notion that to be English is to be “tolerant, white and Anglo-Saxon”. But before it does any of that, it wants to address just one question, and that is this: just why are the English so damned full of themselves? That’s right. Just where does their sense of superiority and entitlement come from? And what makes them think they can strut around the world with missionary zeal interfering in other people’s affairs all the time? OK, that’s several questions, but you see the theme.

Despite an unfortunate title which seemed to have fallen from the pages of the latest Cosmo sex survey (“add some spice to the bedroom: try reverse missionary”), the first instalment of this three-part series about faith, community and religious history had honourable intentions. Its starting premise was that Britain is not just broken but “saturated in secularism”, and throughout it acted as though both presumptions were not only a) true and b) indisputably Bad Things, but also that one was directly responsible for the other.

Following ITV’s resounding victory in the battle of the masters ‘n’ servants period shows – Downton Abbey vs. Upstairs Downstairs, for the uninitiated – the Beeb are overdue for a retaliatory blow. And so the gauntlet has been thrown down, in the unlikely form of what might be the very blandest title ever conceived of for a romantic drama.

You know that kind of smoothly seductive but nonetheless ominous-sounding voice-over that loads of science programmes seem to love? You know, the kind that’s often used to lull us into thinking that what we’re about to hear is going to present us with some really seismic shift in our perceptions? Well, that’s what gets me about some science programmes. That, and the sense that the more dramatic the voice-over the less dramatic the content. That, and the graphics.

Contrary to what he said in 1963, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy did not close Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Although the last inmate appeared to leave the San Francisco Bay island fortress in leg-irons on 21 March 1963, the prisoners and guards had vanished into thin air, leaving it the Marie Celeste of prisons. The cover-up worked. But now, one-by-one, without having aged, the prisoners are back, blazing a trial of murderous mayhem across modern-day San Francisco.

There are any number of television detective shows and to differentiate themselves they all need a USP. The excellent Sherlock is a very knowing modern reworking of the original, Life on Mars was set in a time warp, Dirk Gently uses weird global interconnectivity and Whitechapel's coppers solve crimes by referencing Victorian cases. So a cop show that has none of the bells and whistles of the above is somewhat unique.

In the right hands, the English language can work itself up into an intensely erotic lather. It can seduce and caress, tease and undress. It can perform tantric wonders, all through the power of the word. In the right hands. “You ain’t got yer knob out already?” said Jenny, on the blower to a gentleman while redecorating her kitchen. “Listen to how wet I am.” And she dipped her brush in a sloppy tub of Dulux.

Everything that’s best about the opening episode of Paula Milne’s White Heat, a decade-straddling saga of seven friends who begin as flatmates in 1960s London, is encapsulated in its Hartley-quoting title, The Past Is a Foreign Country. For estranged friends Charlotte (Juliet Stevenson) and Lily (Lindsay Duncan) it’s also a country fraught with unresolved tensions and deeply painful secrets, and one that they’re forced to revisit after a death brings the old group back together in the present day.