American history of the 1930s and ‘40s suddenly seems to be all the rage on TV, cropping up in the reborn Perry Mason, Das Boot and now this new incarnation of Penny Dreadful (Sky Atlantic). The original was a blowsy Gothic mash-up of Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll & Hyde and anything vaguely related that could be made to fit.

David France’s revelatory film may have been subtitled “The Gay Purge”, but from the start it was clear this wasn’t just another documentary from Russia charting the increasing pressure faced by that country’s queer community.

The second series of Das Boot (Sky Atlantic) began strongly, and by the time we reached this last pair of episodes it was almost too agonising to watch. You could argue that it sometimes overreached by stretching the scope of the narrative to breaking point, but at its core it’s a study of human values under impossible pressure.

The nightmarishness of the M25 motorway is well known, especially if you get stuck on the Heathrow section on a wet Sunday night, but as she perambulated around the motorway’s circumference for this idiosyncratic BBC Four documentary, naturalist Helen Macdonald showed us how skilfully nature deals with man-made monstrosities.

In her surprisingly self-revealing collection of essays and interviews Frantumaglia (Neapolitan dialect word for a disquieting jumble of ideas), the writer who calls herself Elena Ferrante often ponders the metamorphosis from novel to film.

The eyes have it in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, which is in no way to discount this venerable writer's gift for words. Time and again in this vaunted series of dramatic solos, ten of which have now been remade alongside two new ones, a character will interrupt a thought only to be seen peering at us or into the middle distance or directly into the dark heart of psychic disturbance.

Singing in a choir can be terrific therapy for anxiety, depression or loneliness, but one of the cruellest effects of the coronavirus is the way it has restricted normal human interaction. The notion of social distancing might have been designed to sabotage the proximity and togetherness which is so much a part of collective singing.

It fell out of the sky in the summer of 1947, and crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. UFO-logists and conspiracy fanatics insist it was an alien spacecraft, but the US Air Force says it was a meteorological balloon.

Rather like David Suchet’s Poirot, the world will always think of Raymond Burr as the doughty defence lawyer Perry Mason, whom he played in nine TV series and 26 TV movies between 1957 and 1993. But Burr’s Mason existed before the age of the prequel, which now brings us HBO’s impressively-mounted back story of the battling attorney (showing on Sky Atlantic).

Alarm bells start ringing whenever you discover an author is adapting their own work for a screenplay. In the case of New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, the alarm proves to be false.