Education, education, education. Have we ever worried so much about how, and what, and why, and where our children are being taught? We’re so desperate, it seems, for some guidance on the matter that we barely raise an eyebrow about turning their trials and tribulations into fodder for reality television. Never mind the dubious ethics, we might learn something.

One didn’t keep a detailed log on the state of decomposition of each and every corpse in all umpteen series of Waking the Dead. Being cold cases, they were none of them too presentable. But did any make quite such a mess as ep one of The Body Farm, which took care to begin last night with a bang? To be more forensic, an explosion distributed blood and gristle evenly around a high-rise flat, leaving not much in the way of too too solid flesh. Or as Dr Eve Lockhart put it, “a carpet of decomposing carrion covering walls, floor and ceiling”.

A spectre is haunting Britain - the spectre of a film called Big Fat Gypsy Gangster. Poised for release in just over a week’s time, this Ricky Grover vanity project is described generously as “Monty Python meets Snatch”, chronicling the life and times of Bulla, apparently “Britain’s hardest man”, as he roams over London with a shotgun, blowing the heads off his gangland opponents. It’s a crime comedy-drama for the ages, boasting performances from Peter Capaldi, Steven Berkoff and, less illustriously, comedian Omid Djalili, Tulisa from The X Factor, Big Mo from EastEnders as “Aunt Queenie” and a cameo appearance from fraudulent "psychic medium” Derek Acorah.

Appropriate Adult began with a series of jumpy scenes mapping the bustling domestic landscape of trainee social worker Janet Leach. It was as though we were being offered one last hit of the oxygen of conventional family life (though not, we later learned, one without its own troubles) before we descended into the dead, airless realm of peepholes, incest and floodlit excavations for bones and buried nightmares.

Following the fanfare that accompanied the publication of In Cold Blood in 1965, Truman Capote, ever the consummate self-publicist, claimed to have written a book that was truly different and original - even, perhaps, the first of its kind. For many critics, the “non-fiction novel”, as Capote was calling it, belonged to a tradition dating back to Daniel Defoe’s The Storm (1704), in which Defoe used the voices of real people to tell his story, a tradition that boasted many exponents, among them Mark Twain, Dickens, Steinbeck, James Agee and Lillian Ross.

Ben Wheatley’s debut Down Terrace, about a Brighton crime family whose bickering resembles Abigail’s Party, then Macbeth, had almost no budget and was literally home-made. Many critics still realised that it was one of the best and most original films of 2010. With its cult success repeated in the US, Wheatley has quickly followed it with the most assured and troubling British horror film in many years.

You must have come across those “happiness quotient” surveys, which judge the relative achievements on the contentment front across a series of countries. The last one I recall gave Denmark the Number One spot, with a remarkable 96 per cent classing themselves as lykkelig, as the feel-good factor is known locally. If you were left wondering about the other four per cent, Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm’s R: Hit First, Hit Harder offers some clues.

On October 10, 1994, a burglar with a sledgehammer smashed a window at the Rembrandt House Museum and stole a single painting, Man with a Beard (1647). The work had once been considered a Rembrandt, but is now attributed to an unidentified student of his. Its theft occasioned this inevitable headline in the International Herald Tribune: “Rembrandt Needed a Night Watchman”. Beard made its way back four years later after being seized from an Amsterdam lawyer who was reputed to be a shady intermediary for art recovery, having been involved in a Van Gogh case as well. The lawyer was privately reprimanded, a fairly light penalty for such transgressions by Dutch historical standards. In Rembrandt’s century, the judiciary was more ruthless when dealing with theft, housebreaking, and serving as a known fence. The penalties included amputation of a hand, nose or ear, branding and scarring of the cheek, and even the gallows for repeat offenders.

Street art – or graffiti to give the old-money name by which many still know it – gets people going. Worthless or priceless? Criminal or cultural? Earlier this week theartsdesk carried a review of the Channel 4 documentary Graffiti Wars about the street rivalry between Banksy and Robbo. Rarely has a television review prompted so many readers to write in and comment on the site. But whichever way you slice it, it’s a vagabond art form whose practitioners are used to dodging the law and shrouding their ID behind a nom de guerre. This new set of photographs captures something of the danger and the clandestine thrill associated with street art and graffiti.

Street art – or graffiti to give the old-money name by which many still know it – gets people going. Worthless or priceless? Criminal or cultural? Earlier this week theartsdesk carried a review of the Channel 4 documentary Graffiti Wars about the street rivalry between Banksy and Robbo. Rarely has a television review prompted so many readers to write in and comment on the site. But whichever way you slice it, it’s a vagabond art form whose practitioners are used to dodging the law and shrouding their ID behind a nom de guerre. This new set of photographs captures something of the danger and the clandestine thrill associated with street art and graffiti.

This is ferocious popular cinema. The original Elite Squad (2007) was an iconic hit in Brazil, detailing the training, private lives and bloody ghetto raids of BOPE, the black-suited elite Rio police force led by charismatic Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura). Director José Padilha resisted offers to convert the film’s commercial clout into a TV franchise, instead expanding this sequel into a total indictment of Brazilian society. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is the most politically and socially engaged, best action film this year.