Tim Burton’s fans always want him to hit the sweet spot again, to give them another Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is not quite there, but it’s not for lack of trying. The weakness lies in Jane Goldman’s script, adapted from the eponymous YA novel. There is way too much exposition – characters explain the plot to each other, not just at the outset, but throughout the movie.

Super Furry Animals front man Gruff Rhys is a quietly prolific talent. Every few years or so, there’ll be another album, complete with the kind of thought-through concept that gives lift to his literate and expressive story songs and colours them with context.

Bruce Chatwin’s sense of place stayed slippery. If he had roots, they were in the Black Mountains across the Welsh border, a fond childhood memory he deepened for his third book with the rich anecdotes buried in old newspapers. The tale this iconoclastic travel writer spun in On the Black Hill was of twin brothers, Benjamin and Lewis, who stay put in their patch of Wales as the 20^th century and its World Wars grind past them, like the noise of a car in the next field. Book and film are about lives in a landscape, each enriching the other.

This is not a standard dance music story. Marquis Hawkes is one of the club music success stories of the past couple of years – since the first release in 2012 on Glasgow's revered Dixon Avenue Basement Jams, there've been many 12" club hits on multiple connoisseurs' labels, and his album Social Housing on the Fabric club's Houndstooth label has soundtracked many people's summer this year, with the artist all the while remaining anonymous.

There is a grand ongoing project in Wales at the moment, the goal of which is to hunt for the deep ancestral DNA of the Welsh people. CymruDNAWales has already made some startling findings, in particular about a dozen all-powerful chieftains from 1500 years ago whose DNA is found in a large number of Welsh males. But enough about Welsh men and women. What about Welsh dogs?

What happened was this. I found my way, not without difficulty, to the Barry Memo Arts Centre, got my ticket, had a chat with the librettist, stopped to order an interval drink, then turned round to discover that the entire audience had disappeared, as if eliminated by a Star Wars de-atomiser, or whatever those things are called. Two or three of us ran outside, looked this way and that, and after a few panic-stricken minutes tracked down the audience, who had gone right round the building in a crocodile and re-entered it by a door on the far side.

Laura Mvula talks almost as much as she sings. Between songs she confesses to rambling, but her musings – on heartbreak, on “toilet analogies” for the recording process, on meeting the Duke of Edinburgh and then falling over – are never less than disarmingly engaging. At times it verges on stand-up comedy. Mostly, she simply reveals aspects of herself: charismatic, sassy, down-to-earth, a girl from Birmingham with an incredible gift. The show begins with “Who I Am” and all but ends with “Phenomenal Woman”. It’s pretty easy to see the middle of the gig as an equals sign.

“Are you enjoying Wales, John?” shouts a fan, eventually. Our returning hero has remained taciturn and all but static at his keyboard throughout an epic show that spans one of popular music’s most interesting and influential careers. Cale affects to have misheard. “Am I rejoining Wales?” he ponders. “I certainly hope so. I feel like I’m rejoining every time I’m here.”

Culture, said Aneurin Bevan, comes off the end of a pick. A hundred years ago there was no shortage of picks when a quarter of a million coalminers were employed in south Wales. By now the mines have gone but many of the choirs they created are still here, for the male voice choir is one of the distinctive emblems of Welsh identity.

So just how grey were the 1950s? "It was grey," said Bruce Welch of The Shadows. Au contraire, said Joan Bakewell, the Fifties were "giddy and full of optimism." Veteran journalist Katharine Whitehorn added that not only were the Fifties not boring, but that even then people had already heard of sex.