Sad to report, this fourth series of Call My Agent! (Netflix) will be the final outing for this caustically addictive saga of actors and their agents. The show’s unique trademark has been its success in attracting an impressive roster of A-list French actors and getting them to behave in outlandish and ridiculous ways, but maybe they’re just running out of suitably recognisable names.

The discovery of a grotesque murder is the traditional way to begin a new series of Spiral, and this time around the cadaver belonged to a young Moroccan boy, nicknamed Shkun. He’d been beaten to death with an iron bar and stuffed into a laundromat washing machine. Of course, this was only the end of a piece of string leading Captain Laure Berthaud and her team into a labyrinth of organised crime and drug-smuggling.

Misdirection is at the heart of Le Cercle Rouge.

Just as British pub and punk rock of the mid-to late 1970's ushered in an era of music that referenced the history of pop and thrived on irony, much of the French New Wave, nearly 20 years earlier, looked back as much as forward, an avant-garde anchored like none other before in a sense of cinema history.

It’s surprising, perhaps, that the dramatic potential of chess hasn’t been more widely exploited. There was a nail-biting tournament in From Russia with Love, while the knight’s chequerboard struggle with Death was the centrepiece of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. In 1972 the game became a proxy for global power politics when Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in Iceland, an event former world champion Garry Kasparov called “a crushing moment in the midst of the Cold War”.

In a bold first strike – straight to the gut, surely, for many in the audience – the Wigmore Hall’s “Proust Night” began with an old recording of the Berceuse from Fauré’s Dolly Suite. Clever. How apt that the signature tune from Listen With Mother (a beloved old BBC radio show of stories for younger children) should have been composed by a friend – and idol – of the writer whose own rapt entanglement in the mother-child bond threads through his life and work.

Is Emily in Paris “the dumbest thing on Netflix right now?” or a sugar-rush of escapism in the midst of our global pandemic misery? “We need things to make us smile,” commented one Parisian viewer. “In the time of Covid,we don’t need more to stress us out.”

William Boyd’s fiction is populated by all manner of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians and film-makers, drawn from real life or entirely fictional, are regular patrons of his stories. Boyd’s latest novel, Trio, is no different.

The only thing confusing with Les Misérables is its pointedly provocative title, as there are no costumed urchins and no singing involved. Searching online to find the UK cinemas where it’s playing this week entails a trek past the execrable 2012 musical of the same name, but it’s well worth tracking down a screen that's showing this exhilarating and intelligent new film.

"You talk like Marlene Dietrich, you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire, your clothes are all made by Balmain, and there’s diamonds and pearls in your hair…" . Peter Sarstedt may have been a one-hit wonder, but his 1969 pop song, "Where do you go to (my lovely)?" passed into British popular culture in a flash, even if many of its chic references were lost on future generations. Zizi Jeanmaire, who died last Friday aged 96, personified the Paris of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and beyond.