A monstrous celebration prefaced by thunderous organ chords is always going to be more the Albert Hall’s kind of thing than a comic opera viewed through the wrong end of the telescope. So Strauss’s Festival Prelude kicked off a first half of 150^th birthday celebrations in more appropriate style than last week’s Der Rosenkavalier.

The RAF's renowned aerobatics team found itself at the centre of a political mini-storm last week when it was asked to use only blue and white smoke trails (but not red) at the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in Glasgow. The MoD briskly quashed the request, prompting dark rumours about an anti-separationist conspiracy in Whitehall. However, I can't imagine the pilots themselves even noticed, so ferociously do they have to concentrate on their day jobs.

Sir Roger Norrington, 80 this year, produced a masterful St John Passion in the first of his two appearances at this year’s Proms, built around his excellent Swiss chamber orchestra and the Zürcher Sing-Akademie.

Supposedly, The Mill [*] was Channel 4's highest-rating drama of 2013, and the viewers' reward is this second series. However, the secret of the success of this dour, dimly lit series is hard to fathom. Its attempt to convert the history of working-class protest during the Industrial Revolution into a plausible interplay of character is as teeth-gnashingly literal-minded as it was first time round.

“Some might say we’re getting too old for this sort of thing,” declares Martin Jarvis’s Jack Worthing, going off Wlldean piste. Well, we did wonder whether the reunion of Jarvis with Nigel Havers’s Algernon after 32 years might not be some sort of vanity Earnest. But you can trust director Lucy Bailey to make sense not only of “the boys” but also their mature objects of desire, not to mention a Lady Bracknell (Siân Phillips, flawless, pictured below) who at an astonishing 81 is past having a daughter of marriageable age.

Celebrating the 80th anniversary of opera at Glyndebourne, this 90-minute documentary was fascinating when it delved into the house's history, but started to lose its bearings when it came back to the present day and dwelt at laborious length over this season's new production of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. It was as if nobody could decide what sort of film to make, so they made two and cut chunks of them together.

While you give your tent an airing in anticipation of festival season, think about the imaginative adventures your teenyboppers might enjoy – from colourful creative activities to bushcraft workshops and babysitting services, there’s much on offer for burgeoning revelers as well as their party-hardy-folks to enjoy. 

1. Cornbury, July 4-6, Great Tew Park, Oxfordshire

In the year of his 85th birthday, and his 60th season as a conductor, Bernard Haitink is hardly taking it easy, with concerts with various orchestras around Europe and the US including an appearance at the Proms. In this visit to London with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe he may not have been bounding up the steps to the stage, but his powers with the baton remain undimmed.

Great idea. Round up a dozen 20-something American girls whose idea of a royal family is the Kardashians, whisk them off to a stately pile somewhere in the south of England, and put them in a beauty contest to see which one can take the fancy of a bloke who might just be Prince Harry.

With the 70th anniversary of D-Day following hard on the heels of the extensive World War One commemorations, battle fatigue is becoming a very real concern for TV-watchers. Breaking the mould of retrospective war documentaries becomes increasingly difficult, as Messrs Enfield and Whitehouse demonstrated with deadly satirical accuracy in Harry and Paul's Story of the 2s, so all kinds of credit are due to National Geographic's frequently devastating record of the D-Day landings and their immediate aftermath.