Nothing proves a theory better than practice, and this is exactly what Norwegian adventurer-archaeologist-ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl did in 1947 when he and five companions sailed a raft from Peru to Polynesia to prove his hypothesis of how the Pacific islands were originally settled. He thought people first arrived there from the east, not the west, contravening the then-prevailing scientific orthodoxy. But Polynesians didn’t have boats, cried the establishment. Ah, but they had rafts, countered Heyerdahl.

Four years ago Christopher Jefferies was the victim of a concerted attack by the British press. His tenant Joanna Yeates had been murdered and, lacking any other leads, police arrested her landlord. While he was still being questioned, the newspapers sniffed around Jefferies’s patch of Bristol and, armed with a juicy quotation or two, chose collectively to forget all about the principle of innocent until proven otherwise. "Weird", "posh", "lewd", "creepy" were among the epithets in The Sun. He was branded a peeping Tom.

It’s a dark and Danish so of course there is a body. But it’s not that sort of body. The Legacy parts company from what we know of most Nordic television drama. It’s neither a fetid charnel house in which the cops are as freaky as the killers. Nor is it a place of sunshine, smiles and proportional representation. Instead, the latest export from the Danish broadcaster DR belongs to an older form of Scandinavian storytelling: the anguished family saga in which bombs planted back in the distant past detonate in the present. Think Ibsen with Volvos.

On and on the stately galleon sails. The fifth wodge of Downton Abbey has been light on utter knuckle-gnawing preposterousness. Plots conjured up at random from thin air have been in slightly shorter supply than usual. The very worst you can say of it is that Lord Fellowes is no Agatha Christie. The poor old blighted Bateses have now been subject to a matching pair of cack-handed murder mysteries. To get accidentally banged up once in a slow-moving crime plot may be counted a misfortune. Twice looks like cluelessness.

Given the long shadow cast by the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, it’s sort of surprising that no drama department has commissioned something like The Missing before. It’s not the same story of course. The child alluded to in the title is a five-year-old boy, not a three-year-old girl, and he’s abducted in France rather than Portugal. But it’s impossible not to be aware of the story’s factual parallel. And the parental trauma as the awful truth dawns is, one can only imagine, exactly the same.

It takes some brass neck to look at one of the most destructive events in London’s history, which destroyed a chunk of the poorest part of the city and left an estimated 70,000 people homeless, and think that it wasn’t dramatic enough. But that must have been what went through the head of Tom Bradby, the political editor of ITV News, when he was writing his four-part drama: we were deeply immersed in espionage, war, assassination plots, kidnap and a spendthrift, philandering king before as much as a single spark began to fly.

“You’ll only be staying here until one of the paddies shoots you.” The blunt caution given to Private Gary Hook on his arrival in Belfast sets the tone for the army’s attitude towards where he’s been posted, and the tone of locals towards an army any of them might ostensibly join. The breathlessly hard-hitting ‘71 not only captures these tensions with flair, but does so from the incompatible, irreconcilable points of view of those caught up in and sucked into them.

Marvellous reviews itself in its title. The story of Neil Baldwin starring Toby Jones was – and is, because you should catch it while you can on iPlayer – simply marvellous. As a dramatic character Neil Baldwin could be mistaken for unremarkable. He has no hidden depths. Positioned somewhere along the autistic spectrum, he is apparently away with the fairytales, but his grandiose fantasies mostly happened to be true.

When Rachel Bailey (Suranne Jones) told the promotion board at the beginning of this series: “I’m not a liability, I’m a safe pair of hands”, we knew it would be a matter of sitting back and waiting to see in what manner she would heap disgrace upon herself.

If Molly Dawes (Lacey Turner) had to find one act of heroism with which to fully incorporate herself into her new squadron before the credits rolled, she couldn’t have planned it better: winched aboard a helicopter, her fist in the groin of the one-night stand who had been undermining her since her arrival to stop him bleeding to death, while Paramore - or some fearsome girl-rock on a more acceptable budget - throbbed in the background.