“Are they all like that?” asks a shaken Major Bucky Egan (Callum Turner), after he’s completed his first bombing mission over Germany as a guest of the US Eighth Air Force’s 389th Bomb Group. They’ve been battered by flak and lacerated by German fighters, and the front half of their B-17 bomber looks like an abattoir. His pilot looks ahead with a thousand-yard stare, and says “don’t tell your guys anything, they’ll figure it out.”

This September Steven Wilson issued The Harmony Codex, his seventh solo record in 16 years. Though rooted in mortal concerns and alert to real-world dangers, this radiant suite of electronically textured songs is so dreamily redolent of movement it makes you (or me, anyway) think of astral journeys. Not the space rock variety but those taken across the plains and through the valleys and canyons and cities, some of them ruined, of private inland empires.

There’s a thread of bright magic running through British cinema, from Powell and Pressburger through Nic Roeg, Derek Jarman and Lynne Ramsay, and it’s wrapped around Jarman’s last home like fisherman’s rope.

Mischief Theatre set themselves a big challenge when they evolved their brand of knowing slapstick. And not just about how to destroy the scenery without maiming themselves.

More crucially, they have to pull off the Janus-faced trick of playing the amateur actors of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, indicated below in quotation marks, while getting the audience to applaud their brilliance. Mostly they succeed.

Familiarity has bred something quite fantastic with the Old Vic Christmas Carol, which is back for a seventh season and merits ringing all available bells - those and a lost love called Belle being crucial to the show. Matthew Warchus's staging at this point seems a seasonal imperative, and in a wild-haired Christopher Eccleston, Jack Thorne's adaptation of Dickens's 1843 call to empathic arms has its most emotionally piercing and resonant leading man yet. 

The National Theatre these days seems to be going from hit-to-hit, with transfers aplenty and full houses at home. And there's every reason to expect that this fizzy adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1983 creep-out, The Witches, has the West End and further in its sights.

Lord love a duck, Elsie, music ’all’s ’avin a bleedin’, whatchamacallit, comeback, innit? The release of Joe Jackson’s 19th studio album Joe Jackson Presents Max Champion in What a Racket! a week after Madness’s Theatre of the Absurd Presents C’est la Vie might prove the full extent of this revival. 

This seems to be a season for films majoring on bisexuality, with the awards round encompassing Ira Sachs’s Passages, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, a story of high-class high jinks in a modern twist on Evelyn’s Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

Pete Doherty’s notorious tabloid image as Kate Moss’s junkie rock star boyfriend blessedly faded following that relationship’s end, stopping short of Amy Winehouse territory. Katia deVidas’s documentary focuses on that addiction through his preferred self-image as a latter-day Rimbaud, a punk poet more suited to his current French home. The result is remarkably unvarnished, but narrowly framed.

The shop assistant turned World War Two Land Army girl Alison Smith, clad in a summer dress on the sabbath, steps through a glade onto a hilltop track above the village of Chillingbourne in Kent. It’s the same road once taken by medieval pilgrims riding to seek blessings or do penance at Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral.