Looking back over the past 12 months, it struck me how it has been the shows fashioned from personal stories that have stayed with me. It wasn't simply that the comics could make very good jokes about their travails or embarrassments, but that the material had a strong ring of authenticity. There's nothing wrong with delivering other people's gags (plenty of top-flight performers do it, of course) but when it rings true, it's somehow funnier.

They say cinema is dying (you never know, they may be wrong), but you can’t help noticing the stampede of movie stars towards TV and streaming. Many of 2024’s most memorable shows had a big-screen name attached, even if it was impossible to be entirely certain that it really was Colin Farrell inside all those prosthetics as he romped his way through the gripping second season of The Penguin (Sky Atlantic).

A reissue can be an aide-mémoire, a reminder that a record which has been off the radar for a while needs revisiting, that it deserves fresh attention.

The most hyped special of the season came to a cosy comedy ending with pairings accomplished, evil witch Sonia and her coven dispatched and the usual everyday chaos reinstated. Tidy.

Ireland takes the palm for best of 2024, with Wexford hitting comic heights among its three rarities in Donizettian let’s-make-an-opera, while Irish National Opera gave us a world-class Salome, a Vivaldi rarity strongly cast, a Rigoletto featuring my favourite performance from a Manchester-born Irish-Iranian soprano, and the perfect solution to Berlioz’s half-Shakespearean Béatrice et Bénédict, thanks to Fiona Shaw and three more sensational Irish women.

In April 2023 the actor and comic Jamie Foxx had a stroke and was lucky to survive. In his latest Netflix Special, What Had Happened Was... he tells us about it, and his recovery. It's fitting, he tells us, that the show was recorded in Atlanta, just 400 yards away from the hospital he was taken to by his sister, who knew something was seriously wrong.

It's the images that linger in the mind as I think back on a bustling theatre year just gone. Sure, the year fielded excellent productions (and some duds, too), but as often as not it's a particular sight that sticks in the mind.

Since its revival in 2020, All Creatures Great and Small has drawn big audiences internationally and become Channel 5’s biggest hit, even if there have been occasional grumbles about how it takes liberties with James Herriot’s original books.

Travis arrived onstage with the theme tune from classic sitcom Cheers as an accompaniment. The cavernous OVO Hydro might not be a place where everyone knows your name, but a Glasgow homecoming by local lads made good certainly tapped into a festive vibe of friends and familiarity, with singer Fran Healy making ample reference to the group’s roots during their set.

Robert Eggers' strength as a director is his ability to bring historical periods alive with gritty, tactile realism. He does this successfully because of his anthropological attention to props, costume and language, but also his willingness to treat the era’s belief system as concrete reality. There’s nothing glib or anachronistic about his films set among 17th century New England Puritans, 19th century fishermen or 11th century Icelandic vikings.