This is a fairy tale which may send children to sleep before the good bits, then wake them up screaming at the first glimpse of loping, bestial giants. Splicing Jack the Giant-Killer (subject of a 1962 kids’ monster movie which gave me nightmares) and the more familiar Jack and the Beanstalk, it has farmboy Jack (Nicholas Hoult) spilling the magic beans, and following mildly rebellious princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) up the resultant beanstalk to a stone kingdom of giants above the clouds.

He may have been lampooned in his lifetime as the man who kept a pet wasp, but Britain owes much to John Lubbock, the Victorian MP whose legislation gave the country its first bank holiday. His Ancient Monuments bill of 1882 (nicknamed the “monumentally ancient bill" for how long it took to get through Parliament) was even more far-seeing, paving the way for the Heritage movement as we know it.

"I'm so worn out with it," a character remarks in a different context well into Rufus Norris's film Broken, to which one is tempted to respond, "Ain't that the truth!" A dissection of so-called "broken Britain" in all its jagged disarray, stage director Norris's debut film wants to be excoriating but is instead mainly exhausting and feels infinitely longer than its briefish running time.

It looks as if Broadchurch will reveal itself as a "town-with-murky-secrets" story, but on the evidence of this first episode we can expect it to be done with a skilful touch and a fine eye for detail. The trigger for the action is the death of 11-year-old Danny Latimer, but writer Chris Chibnall is focusing on the effect this has on family and friends as much as on the grim event itself.

The generational time-bomb is a popular dramatic device - ITV were at it only  a couple of months ago with The Poison Tree - and new five-parter Lightfields boldly sprawls itself across three separate eras (1944, 1975 and 2012). Binding it all together is the titular location, a farmhouse in Suffolk, through which the different generations of characters pass.

In 1973 certain world events carved themselves, a bit like the faces on Mount Rushmore, deep into the landscape of the late 20^th century. No sooner had Richard Nixon begun to end the Vietnam War than Watergate broke. In the autumn Allende was overthrown by Pinochet in Chile; Egypt and Syria’s attack on Israel ignited the Yom Kippur war. A global oil crisis was to leave western economies strapped.

You don’t have to live under a totalitarian regime to write music of profound anguish. I was driven to argue the point at a Shostakovich symposium when an audience quizzer took issue with my assertion that Britten could go just as deep as the Russian. Much as the works of the two composers in this programme, Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto and Britten’s Spring Symphony, revealed their lighter sides to varying degrees, it was our anniversary composer who scored highest with his darker undercurrents.

When's the last time you encountered a play with a hissable anti-hero and a young heroine who radiates charity, decency, and all things good? Those polarities are on full-throttle view in The Stepmother, the all-but-unknown Githa Sowerby play from 1924 that makes up in its vigorous appeal to the jugular what it may lack in dimension and subtlety (Chekhov this ain't.) And if the opening night is any gauge, Sowerby's tale of a young wife and her unctuous, much older rapscallion of a husband has a demonstrable capacity for evoking responses from the crowd.

For a man who lives in an agreeable region of France, Jonathan Meades grew strangely passionate in the course of this fascinating excursion around Essex. The thuggish-looking narrator travelled by small, functional Toyota rather than Magical Mystery Tour-style charabanc, though the latter would have been perfectly apt for tales of Cockneys seeking escape in the county described by one sneering commentator as "the dustbin of London".