In the same week that ITV was rounding up Britain's dangerous dogs, the Beeb aired Louis Theroux's report [****] on the unwanted canines roaming the streets of gang-infested South Los Angeles. LA has six dog pounds (we learned), through which 35,000 ownerless dogs pass annually. A lot of them, even healthy ones, end up being euthanised because it's impossible to find homes for them all.

“You can never embarrass politicians by giving them publicity.” Michael Heseltine’s verdict on Spitting Image – he claimed, of course, he never watched it – was surely one of the truer things said in last night's Arena memorial Whatever Happened to Spitting Image?, marking the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the satirical puppet show. It certainly seemed balanced when set alongside an apoplectic Ted Heath, who accused those behind it of being, basically, a bunch of jealous, irresponsible losers.

Thirty years ago this month, the National Coal Board announced the closure of 20 pits that were deemed "uneconomic", a decision which would incur the loss of 20,000 jobs. Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, responded by calling a strike that would become the longest industrial dispute in British history. It was also probably the most bitter, as the recollections of the former miners and their wives assembled for this documentary painfully demonstrated.

Mothers and their sons provided the framework for the latest story involving DCI Alan Banks, the character on whom ITV is pinning its hopes to fill the vacancy of the nation’s favourite detective now that Frost and Morse are no more. Peter Robinson’s series of novels has been enjoyed for more than 25 years, selling millions in the UK and translated into more than 20 languages, but it took until 2010 to reach our television screens with Stephen Tompkinson in the starring role.

We return to the dramatised Selfridges five years after the opening of the store that changed the face of British shopping - and yet, despite proving those who doomed his enterprise to failure wrong, the smile on its eponymous owner’s face is as false as his moustache is magnificent. Although Harry Selfridge (Jeremy Piven) was able to turn on the charm for visiting journalists in tonight’s series opener, the absence of his wife and daughters - back home in the US where the girls, we are told, were finishing school - cast a shade over the celebrations.

For a drama as committed to the exploration of the changing role of women in post-war Britain, The Bletchley Circle isn’t above a little sleight of hand. The second series of the critically acclaimed whodunnit began with a flashback to 1943 and to Alice Merren (Hattie Morahan), a bright young codebreaker who quickly solves a puzzle that the menfolk have been bamboozled by for the past two days.

“Her most devastating surprise ever.” Thus spake The Guardian, a quote happily slapped across the cover of the first paperback edition of Agatha Christie’s 1967 thriller Endless Night. While I wouldn’t go quite that far – that honour goes to her still startling, genre-busting The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) – it’s a compelling little chiller. Small wonder that ITV wanted it for their franchise. Just one tiny problem: it’s a crime novel without a detective.

No definitive answers to what was "the best" of 2013 of course, and I daresay opinions will differ wildly. For instance, despite the plaudits showered on it elsewhere, I felt that Broadchurch stretched itself too thin after showing initial promise. An increasingly acute allergy to serial killer dramas meant I couldn't get too involved with Tony Grisoni's Southcliffe, let alone The Fall, with its extended, voyeuristic murder scenes.

In her role as host of this 20th-anniversary celebration, Dannii Minogue was not afraid to ask the tough questions that fans of Ireland’s greatest - or possibly other greatest - boy band wanted to know. “It’s the elephant in the room,” admitted Keith Duffy (the handsome one, not that you would have been caught dead admitting it in the Nineties, who later went on to appear in Coronation Street) with a nervous laugh.

There was a time when England’s greatest and most charismatic footballer of the last 40 years would inspire fine writers to flights of poetry. Karl Miller in the London Review of Books compared him to “a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun”. Not to be out-hyperbolised, Ian Hamilton in Granta invoked a Miltonic Old Testament hero in his essay “Gazza Agonistes”.