White-knuckle crescendos loom large in that greater-than-ever conductor Neeme  Järvi's spruce Indian summer. Short-term bursts were the chief payoff in tackling Dvořák's deceptively simple-seeming Serenade for Strings with a huge department on all too little rehearsal time, but they also helped to pave the way for the two big events in Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony: not just the infamous "invasion" sequence based on Ravel's Boléro, but above all the final slow burn. It was ultimately here that Järvi's mastery of the long, inward line showed us what creative conducting is all about.

Is there a televisual instruction manual for Nazi-era dramas? Cabaret singers with heavily kohled eyes, champagne from unmatched glasses in a shabby-chic apartment, smoke-filled gay bars in cellars with muscled trade, Stormtroopers marching in lockstep and Nazi banners unfurling from windows would all be on it. If there is, Christopher and His Kind last night was following it - but then it also wrote it.

Christopher Isherwood is responsible as much as anyone for our perceptions of the period, but after decades of cinematic and theatrical adornments and encounters in this mode, a production of Isherwood's memoir cannot help but seem hackneyed, a victim of its own style. Still, returning to the source (in Kevin Elyot's adaptation) at least allows us to understand that before the style there was a story.

The story, rather depressingly, is of a one-man universe, of the complete selfishness of Isherwood (Doctor Who's Matt Smith) amid decadence and disaster in Berlin. It is a wildly unsympathetic part: Isherwood cannot see the world beyond his penis. The film shows this very well, both in the vivid yet unerotic sex scenes (this film will be heaven for Doctor Who slash fiction fans) and in the whirling and unexpected camera angles, which replicate the novelty and horror of everything to Isherwood, who is unworldly - or uninterested.

Isherwood is politically uninterested, certainly - despite great chunks of exposition from other characters (your heart falls when you get another GCSE history class) and their urgent moral opinions, Isherwood fails to stir himself at the rise of the Nazis, and even seeing the Nazis beat up someone hardly motivates him. He checks out a Nazi at an adjacent urinal, for God's sake. A wealthy Jew challenges him about opting out from "the messy business of living" in favour of art.

It takes a bravura scene of book-burning for him to contemplate the "shame, shame" he mutters about: both the Nazis' and his own. The scene works so well because, although we often hear about it, the dragging of carts of books, the enthusiasm of the arsonists, the random pages of books thrown up into the night sky on the force of the fire are rarely as vivid to us. (Having Wilde and Mann's books on the pyre, licked by flames, was probably overdoing it.)

But even after this it seems that he is emotionless. He cannot understand how his boyfriend will not leave Berlin and his brother - Isherwood found it easy enough to leave his own brother with their shrewish mother. He wants to get his boyfriend out of Germany, but confesses to being slightly relieved when he is deported from England, facing an uncertain fate. Matt Smith is able to take on the unpleasantness, even the deadness, of his interior as Isherwood appears more of a monster, and every time his heart does not break, Smith manages to make him look almost sorry for it.

Imogen Poots plays Jean Ross, the inspiration for Sally Bowles, and when they meet in Knightsbridge before the war, she flashes him her copy of his book, glad that he has cannibalised her life, just like he has turned Toby Jones's preening queen into literary fodder. Like much of the rest of the film, and Isherwood confesses this at the start and towards the end, we are watching his memories, not fact, and only in his mind could Ross feel this way. Poots and Jones humiliate Smith in their emotional shading, but Smith never stood a chance by pouring himself into this chilling man, even though he does so convincingly.

Isherwood leaves, and not just Berlin - he goes to California. In a late scene in his Seventies Californian apartment, he confesses that he was isolated but says that he was helping the cause of gay rights without realising it at the time (by screwing a series of models from Vogue tableaux, according to this film). In his political, financial, social, sexual safety, this comes across as base self-justification a million years and a million miles after he fled. I suspect the director wants us to have some sympathy for Isherwood, with a touching shot of a meaningful Berlin-era clock, but after this film, sympathy is denied to the man who denied sympathy to all others.

Tender, funny and overwhelmingly moving, Trevor Nunn’s revival of this 1942 drama by Terence Rattigan – part of the playwright’s centenary-year celebrations – is a masterly piece of theatre. The big box-office draw may be Sienna Miller, but she’s by no means the star of the show: if there is one, it’s Sheridan Smith, whose performance is nothing short of glorious.

Alan Bleasdale, along with Dennis Potter one of the truly original voices of British television drama, has spent the past decade in silence. His brand of epic narrative, his penchant for letting his characters talk and talk, went out of fashion when along came a generation of younger writers who nicked Yosser Hughes’s catchphrase - “I could do that” – and slipped into his slots. He has returned with this, a sweeping drama replete with all the Bleasdalian virtues: a huge cast of characters, an astute eye for the historical hinterland, and a belief that human decency abides in unexpected places. In this case, a German U-boat.

A disproportionate number of column inches seem to have been devoted to James Purefoy’s matinee-idol looks, his ability to carry off a pair of breeches and the amount of time he appears on television naked. However, while he has admittedly spent much of his career swaggering around in period costume - Vanity Fair with Reese Witherspoon, Mark Antony in HBO’s Rome, the recently released Ironclad - he has also played, among many other things, a psychopathic rapist, a stalker and the fraudster Darius Guppy.

Blithe Spirit was born in the shadow of the Blitz: Noël Coward, whose London home had just been bombed, wrote it in Portmeirion, Wales, in 1941 over a brisk six days. But the evil Hun never once puts in an appearance (over breakfast, the characters briefly wonder whether there's anything of note in the morning's Times; of course, there is not). Another, more complicated war is being waged here: the battle of the sexes.

Thirty-five years after Rose Buck took what she thought was her final nostalgic stroll through the empty rooms of 165 Eaton Place in Belgravia, where she had served the Bellamy family for four decades, Jean Marsh has brought Rose back home in the BBC’s three-part remake of Upstairs Downstairs. Also aboard for this much-anticipated revival is Eileen Atkins, who was Marsh’s co-creator of the original version for LWT but was prevented by stage commitments from appearing in it. They were going to call it Behind the Green Baize Door and then Below Stairs before the familiar title was finally settled upon.

It was an awkward brief - create a series which captures the spirit of the original while being a separate creation with its own characters and identity – but this opening episode of three hove into view confidently enough (on board an ocean liner from New York, in fact). The year was 1936, and Sir Hallam and Lady Agnes Holland were returning from America to take up residence in the house that Hallam had inherited from his father.

Its address was of course 165 Eaton Place, which had fallen into a ruinous state but was soon in the throes of energetic refurbishment, bossily supervised by Keeley Hawes’s imperious Lady Agnes. She was quickly issuing lists of demands to Rose, who was now running Buck’s of Belgravia, an agency supplying domestic staff to the Quality, but no ESP was required to predict that the imperishable elastic of destiny was about to twang her back below stairs at number 165.

Being preceded by the remarkable success of ITV’s Downton Abbey is probably a mixed blessing. Downton has vividly demonstrated an appetite for period dramas with a class-war subtext and a pre-war setting (different war, but you get my drift), and has left swathes of viewers gasping for more startling liaisons, seven-course dinners and caustic one-liners from Maggie Smith (or insert dowager-esque equivalent). However, so far you’d have to say that the Downton cast has more strength in depth, and the piece also benefited from the mischievous and ironic wit of its creator Julian Fellowes (Eileen Atkins as Lady Maud, pictured below).

This first episode of Upstairs Downstairs felt bogged down with exposition and scene-setting, and despite a hyperactive subplot featuring Ivy the housemaid and Johnny the inebriate footman, it walked blithely into the Momentous Events from History trap which recently hamstrung Any Human Heart. This may be a result of the timorous decision to make only an exploratory three episodes, causing everything to be crammed in and speeded up. In this first hour, we learned of the death of King George V, with Rose taking the opportunity while queueing to view the lying-in-state to persuade Mrs Thackeray (Anne Reid) to accept the post of cook in the Holland household. We had the accession of flaky Edward VIII, gossip about that brassy Mrs Simpson, Hitler ranting on the wireless, and a warning from Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to Sir Hallam (Ed Stoppard, rendered virtually immobile by starch and Brylcreem) about that bounder von Ribbentrop, in London to whip up support for the Nazis. It was like a Coles Notes summary of the path to World War Two.

Thank heavens for Dame Eileen, playing Hallam’s feisty and eccentric mother Lady Maud, who had returned from decades of colonial service in India accompanied by a precocious pet monkey and a manservant, Mr Amanjit (Art Malik, verging on the ludicrous in beard and turban). Hallam, who’s a bit wishy-washy, like one of Bertie Wooster’s daft chums from the Drones Club, has found himself caught in a titanic clash of wills between Lady Maud and his wife. When Maud airily rewrote both the menu and the guest list for Lady Agnes’s cocktail party, there was almost an ahistorical outbreak of nuclear war when her invitee Wallis Simpson (Emma Clifford) swept through the front door, accompanied not by the anticipated King Edward, but by the supercilious von Ribbentrop (Edward Baker-Duly).

It took quick thinking by the dyspeptic butler Mr Pritchard (Adrian Scarborough) to effect the speedy egress of the Boche from the premises. But I don’t think Lady Agnes would really have bellowed “Perhaps you’ll let me choose my own guests next time” across a room full of politicians and aristocrats at her mother-in-law, do you?

All good fun, but this mini-series will be over by tomorrow night. We may have to wait for a full-length run before Upstairs Downstairs II can really prove its mettle.

• Read more TV reviews on theartsdesk

THE MANY SIDES OF KEELEY HAWES, DRAMA QUEEN

Ambassadors, BBC Two. Mitchell and Webb and Hawes pack their bags for Tazbekistan to star in a diplomatic comedy drama

Ashes to Ashes, BBC One. Hawes’s Eighties copper goes back to the future in Ashley Pharaoh’s follow-up to Life on Mars

Identity, ITV1. Keeley Hawes and Aidan Gillen on the trail of ruthless cyber-criminals

Line of Duty, BBC Two. Gruelling police corruption thriller keeps spines tingling to the end.

The Casual Vacancy, BBC One. Hawes peddles erotica in JK Rowling's Cotswold village

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses - Richard III, BBC Two. Hawes’s first stab at iambic pentameter opposite Benedict Cumberbatch chilly crook-backed king

The Missing, BBC One. Hawes plays a grieving mother in misery-drenched odyssey

OVERLEAF: CLAIRE FOY’S CV