Acidic showbiz drama Hacks premiered on HBO Max in the States a year ago, and subsequently won a hatful of awards including three Emmys. Now, here it is on Prime Video, so we can get to see what all the fuss is about.

After two years away, Abi Morgan’s acclaimed legal drama/juicy soap The Split returns for its third series, reuniting us with the closely knit, or, you might say, incestuous, law firm of Noble Hale Defoe.

This two-part documentary about how the Eighties were partly shaped by the British Prime Minister and the US President was obviously planned long before the Russians invaded Ukraine, but it’s a powerful illustration of how history doesn’t stop, but keeps coming around again in a slightly reformatted guise. It’s also a timely reminder of what “statesmanship” means, at a time when this elusive commodity has never been in shorter supply.

To a camp bluesy theme tune performed by what sounds like a yowling cat (actually the song’s co-writer, Mick Jagger), this prestige production from Apple TV+ opens up the world of the “slow horses”, the disgraced spies who are the anti-heroes of Mick Herron’s bestselling spy novels. 

The first series of Bridgerton (Netflix) became a ratings-blasting sensation because of the way it thrust a boldly multiracial cast into the midst of a Regency costume drama, and because of the camera-hogging presence of Regé-Jean Page as the swashbuckling Duke of Hastings. Above all, it had countless astonishingly graphic sex scenes.

Two years ago, the fourth season of The Last Kingdom (Netflix) found the Saxon saga not quite hitting peak form, possibly reeling from the fallout of the haunting death of King Alfred (David Dawson). Happily, any doubts are blown away with the arrival of 5, in which the show’s trademarks of knotty dynastic rivalry, anguished romantic entanglements and horrifying eruptions of bloodthirstiness are all roaring ahead at full blast.

The terrain Holding occupies is well travelled, but this new ITV four-part drama travels over it really well. The landmarks are familiar: a quiet rural community, a cop with an unhealthy lifestyle and a secret sorrow, a feud between rival lovers of the local lothario, a long-buried trauma that’s suddenly unearthed. We could be in any rural location in the primetime drama of the past half-century.

Netflix’s fly-on-the-pitwall series has rapidly established itself as a vital ingredient in the tapestry of Formula One coverage, and is credited with giving the sport a huge boost in visibility and popularity, not least in the USA. This fourth outing (now featuring even more undeleted expletives than ever) takes a look back at 2021’s dramatic racing season, which ended in uproar and controversy in Abu Dhabi last December.

Tragically, Shane Warne’s sudden death at age 52 means that Amazon’s new documentary about him has suddenly become an obituary as much as a celebration.

Sidney J Furie’s 1965 film The Ipcress File is a much-loved benchmark of its period. Stylish, sinister, witty and depicting a determinedly un-swinging London, it was conceived as the flipside to the absurdly glamorous James Bond movies and pulled it off with panache. It also had Michael Caine playing the lead role of Harry Palmer, and a superb John Barry soundtrack famously featuring that mysterious instrument, the cimbalom.