Polly Walker's character in Netflix's sumptuous new Regency romance, Bridgerton, could've easily been little more than a villainous Mrs Bennet. We meet Lady Featherington as she's forcing one of her daughters into a tiny corset, muttering about how she could fit her waist "into the size of an orange and a half" when she was the same age.

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.

This is not a film to watch if you’re pregnant. One of the first scenes, a 24-minute continuous take of a home birth that ends in tragedy, is extraordinarily powerful and painful to watch – almost unbearable sometimes – and Vanessa Kirby as Martha, groaning and growling her way through a very realistic labour, is brilliant and unforgettable.

Okay, so some people taught themselves the violin or wrote a novel, but under this year’s circumstances, it was inevitable that television (terrestrial, cable, online or otherwise) was going to clean up. With large chunks of the population forced to stay home, what could be more natural than to reach for the remote controller to magic up another bingeable boxset or Walter's latest noir thriller?

At first glance you might mistake Bridgerton (Netflix) for the latest effusion from the pen of Lord Fellowes, since it conforms so closely to the Fellowesian pattern of manners, money and mores among the English aristocracy. Even the title sounds like a mashup of Downton and Belgravia.

Edgy comedy runs the risk of discomfiting the audience so much that they can't relax and enjoy the show. But Natalie Palamides, appearing as Nate, her alter ego, in Nate: A One Man Show on Netflix, pulls it off, and then some.

Published in June 2016, J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy became a best-seller around the time of that November’s presidential election as people sought to understand why working class whites in the American heartland supported Donald Trump en masse.

When the world was in lockdown and performers turned to TikTok to keep in touch with their fans, Sarah Cooper started using the online platform for short videos where she lip-synced Donald Trump's speeches, and they quickly went global. Not many people can say they owe worldwide fame to Covid and America's worst-ever president.

Pre-release excitement about the fourth coming of The Crown (Netflix) has centred on Emma Corrin’s portrayal of Princess Diana, still big box-office 23 years after her death.

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”.