“The problem is that you’ve been told and not told.” While Ishiguro and his discerning fans would never indulge in anything so crass as hype, there have been whisperings in North London wine bars, over the coffee-morning brews of Home Counties ladies, on terraces of rented villas on the Amalfi Coast. Yes, Never Let Me Go is the one about human cloning, whose characters are living organ farms, existing solely for harvest.

It was Leonard Bernstein who declared of English music that it was “too much organ voluntary in Lincoln Cathedral, too much Coronation in Westminster Abbey, too much lark ascending, too much clodhopping on the fucking village green”. Fey, whimsical and faintly patterned with chintz – English music doesn’t always get the best press. In the hands of the Britten Sinfonia however, it defies any notion of pastel prettiness, stepping out in only the feistiest and most glorious Technicolor.

We remember JM Barrie as the creator of Peter Pan, that quintessentially English fairy story which features Neverland, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, and where “to die would be an awfully big adventure”. Generations have embraced this mythical tale as an expression of the spirit of upper-class Deep England. Here the Victorians are us. But James Matthew Barrie himself was the child of a Scottish Calvinist working-class family, and is the subject of Alexander Wright’s play — a hit in Edinburgh last year — which aspires to be a kind of anti-myth.

Few would dispute the supremacy of Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford among the BBC’s current fleet of costume dramas. Measured, domestic and infinitely gentle, there are no Machiavellian footmen or illicit trysts here, just wholesome country adventures championing those unfashionable values of honesty, neighbourliness and hard work. The lamentable histrionics of the recent Upstairs Downstairs could have done well to note these successes, adapting material free from obvious drama (and in the case of Flora Thompson’s autobiographical trilogy, almost entirely without plot) and fashioning from it something credible and engaging. Lark Rise has its saccharine-sincere faults, but there’s no denying that with its characters back in the Sunday-night television slot, all somehow feels right with the world again.

"Only project!" That's not quite what EM Forster famously wrote, but it serves as the leitmotif of The King's Speech, as ripe a piece of Oscar bait as you are likely to see this year. Neither as visceral as The Fighter nor as resonantly and fully realised as The Social Network, Tom Hooper's film nonetheless fields the necessaries guaranteed to lead this true-life tale of the maladroit stammerer who would be king to many a film awards dais.

“Suicide, parricide and salivation!” Not the ecstasies of a masochist, but the mangled verbal fanfare announcing that The Rivals – Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s classic comedy of manners – is once again a fixture in London’s West End. When it comes to powerhouse comedic casting, the National Theatre has long had the laurels for 2010 sewn up in Simon Russell Beale’s voluminous britches. Partnered by Fiona Shaw in Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance, the pair were mighty indeed. Now, in the dying breaths of the year, we have Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles reunited in two much-beloved comedy roles. So does their Rivals live up to its name and challenge for comedic supremacy?

“How many derelict gasworks can you shoot?” director Patrick Keiller asked almost in despair, at an early screening of his third psychogeographic amble through Britain. Not too many more may be the answer, as Robinson in Ruins significantly misses the mark set by its predecessors, the wonderful London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997). This long look at the landscapes of Oxfordshire and Berkshire does still find sharp moments of beauty and oppression in England’s rolling hills.

Peter Blake (b 1932) seems to have gone seamlessly from a groovy Sixties mover and shaker – he would probably dispute that but, after all, he did hang out with The Beatles – to National Treasure. His new one-man exhibition, Homage 10 x 5 – Blake’s Artists, is a tribute to 10 of the artists who have excited and interested him over the past 50 years. “These are my nod of appreciation,” he says. “A way of saying thank you to the artists I like.”

To vajazzle or not to vajazzle; it’s the question on everyone’s, er, lips. Thanks to ITV’s unlikeliest of hits, The Only Way is Essex, tans will be brighter, teeth whiter and bodies more diamante-encrusted across the nation this winter. It’s the aesthetic equivalent of missionary work, and boy are these guys devout.

There is an excess about the Wigmore Hall’s Arts and Crafts cupola that lends itself to extravagant musical passions. The mural’s cloudy images may profess to picture music as an abstract creature, but the golden tangle of rays and warmly naked limbs make a rather more human case for its attractions. It was a case matched for persuasive enthusiasm (and significantly bettered for taste) last night by The English Concert and Alice Coote, in a programme of charged highlights from 16th and 17th-century repertoire.