Perhaps inspired by its ever-intriguing Walter Presents strand, Channel 4’s new thriller Before We Die is based on a Swedish original called Innan vi dör (“before we die” in Swedish).

Success for the Belgian-Dutch crime series Undercover has led Netflix to produce an origin story for the show’s drug lord character Ferry Bouman (Frank Lammers). While this may be a dream come true for a portion of the show’s diehard fans, this formulaic movie is stalling, predictable and riddled with every gangster cliché in the book.

As the finishing line begins to materialise through the haze of fear, suspicion and zany acronyms, the pace of this sixth series of Line of Duty (BBC One) has hotted up appreciably. In earlier episodes, there sometimes seemed to be a lack of intensity, and even the fabled interview scenes didn’t always grip like they used to. Maybe filming under Covid conditions had something to do with it.

As Line of Duty aficionados debate the identity of H and wonder who DCI Joanne Davidson shares her DNA with, this new three-part series from BBC Two investigates the history of real-life corruption in the Metropolitan Police.

It’s no surprise that 30 years on, the individuals most closely connected to the world’s biggest art heist are showing their age. Anne Hawley was a young woman just months into her directorship of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston when thieves made off with 13 works of art, including a Chinese vase and drawings by Degas, a Vermeer and Rembrandt’s only seascape.

Silent Action makes for a snappier title than the original La polizia accusa: il Servizio Segreto uccide, though the frenzied action in Sergio Martino’s 1975 thriller is anything but silent.

We last saw John Simm on ITV in 2018’s Hong Kong-based murder mystery Strangers, a product from the Jack and Harry Williams script factory which wasted its exotic backdrops with a plot which mooched about in a dispirited fashion before dozing off entirely.

There comes a time when every successful formula can do with an overhaul, and that particular bell may be tolling for Unforgotten (ITV).

One of the sadnesses of covid is that films like Judas and the Black Messiah have been held over for release in the hope that cinemas will reopen. Immersive, intense features like this deserve to be seen in a darkened theatre with no distractions. But as the pandemic drags on in the UK, distributors are forced to debut big films on the small screen and it’s a real shame in this instance. 

I’ll admit, I’ve never been a fan of murder mysteries. Patience is not one of my virtues; if I can’t work something out in 30 seconds, I’m liable to give up, and whodunnits tend to need a bit longer than that.