My, but it’s been a bumper few months for the Baker Street Boy. There’s been Anthony Horowitz’s superior new Holmes novel, The House of Silk, Guy Ritchie’s second instalment of his steampunk take on Sherlock as karate-kicking action hero, and now the return of the BBC’s stylish reboot of Holmes as a new millennium net 'tec. And what a lot of fun it was.

This was the year I finally fell in love with Laura Marling’s music. I liked her first two albums well enough, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that the endless chorus of critical hosannas was more about what people wanted her to be than what she actually was. Well, A Creature I Don’t Know certainly changed all that.

It could have been Fleet Foxes’s Helplessness Blues, or maybe The War on Drugs’s Slave Ambient, but this is the one that keeps being returned to. Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes kept forcing its way to the top of the pile, insisting it had to be heard. The music was forceful, the melodies instantly unforgettable but it was also impossible not to be distracted by the lyrics of “Get Some”: “Don’t pull your pants before I go down… Like the shotgun, I need an outcome, I'm your prostitute, you gonna get some”.

Two French films, both exploring the nature of the erotic charge and its impact on characters whose well-being is off balance. One leaves things mostly unsaid, with its leads barely expressing what’s hanging in the air. The other leaves nothing hanging in the air.

Loneliness is hard to put on stage. There is something about the feeling of unwanted urban solitude which is so repetitive and, let’s face it, boring, that writing a play about it risks sending the audience into the night before the story is properly over. So the first thing to say about Lucinda Coxon’s play, which was first staged in Bath a year ago and now makes a welcome appearance in London, is that it is compelling and never boring. In fact, it has that strange kind of intensity that leaves you feeling completely shell-shocked at the end of the evening.

My Week With Marilyn depicts the supposedly sweet dalliance between Marilyn Monroe – an actress in over her head played by an actress, Michelle Williams, reaching her peak – and eager-beaver gofer Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) during the fraught Pinewood production of Laurence Olivier’s The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956.

Dateline July 14^th, 2357, New Oxford Excavation, UK Sector 71. Uncovered a remarkable haul of artefacts from the early 21^st century. Most pristine among these is a sonic data disc, theoretically a devotional item related to the contemporaneous female fertility symbol known as Rihanna. The disc was discovered intact in a transparent plastic case accompanied by a 120 x 120mm stapled booklet. It appears the disc’s primary purpose was related to sexual arousal.

Until recently, on YouTube, you could watch Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi (1992), one of the funniest and most transgressive videos ever made. In a Swiss chalet, the children Heidi and Peter are being “educated” by their abusive grandfather, who freely indulges his propensity for bestiality, incest, onanism and scopophilia. Played out with the help of masks, inflatable dolls and numerous props, life in this dysfunctional family reveals both childhood innocence and parental responsibility to be a myth.

So Fresh Meat approaches the conclusion of season one and, against my expectations, I’ve become a devoted fan. When it was announced that Peep Show creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain were launching a new sitcom, based around a Manchester student household, it sounded promising; perhaps a postmodern update on The Young Ones was in the offing. Peep Show fans were expecting a riot of sordid humour and cruel jokes of embarrassment. We had those in spades. What we weren’t expecting were such wonderfully written and acted character studies.