ITV’s Sunday evening costume drama slot is filled for the next six weeks with this lacklustre adaptation of JG Farrell’s satirical novel, The Singapore Grip. Set in 1942, it was written in 1978 as the final part of his trilogy about British colonialism in Ireland, India and the Far East.

Apart from her acting abilities, the qualities which made Sheridan Smith a star were her authenticity and lack of pretension.

It fell out of the sky in the summer of 1947, and crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. UFO-logists and conspiracy fanatics insist it was an alien spacecraft, but the US Air Force says it was a meteorological balloon.

Former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly famously commented that football is far more serious than a matter of life and death. This couldn’t quite be said of Harry Redknapp’s renewed adventures of footballers reunited (ITV), yet behind its jokey facade of a bunch of Nineties-era England veterans drinking their way across Europe, Harry’s Heroes is strangely poignant and delivers some painful emotional truths.

Portmeirion, the Italianate village created by architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis on the River Dwyryd estuary, might have been designed to provide the perfect surreal setting for the 1967 TV series The Prisoner. But though it resembles an opium dream of doll’s houses and fairytale landscapes, Portmeirion has proved remarkably sturdy, and with

Between 1972-1992 five series of Van der Valk were made for ITV, starring Barry Foster as the eponymous Amsterdam detective. Nearly 30 years later comes this reincarnation with Marc Warren in the title role, no doubt hoping to find a regular home in the juicy two-hour Sunday night slot.

James Graham’s play Quiz was a hit in Chichester in 2017 and then made a much-admired transfer to the West End. Considering its subject matter – the fabled “Coughing Major”, Charles Ingram, who allegedly cheated his way to the titular seven-figure sum on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – it was a natural for TV.

The case of the British teenager allegedly raped by a group of young Israeli men in Ayia Napa in Cyprus last year, only to find herself convicted of “public mischief”, has built up a head of steam in the international press and has provoked outrage among women’s movements and rights campaigners. Reactions were triggered not just by the nature of the act itself, but also by the way the case was handled by the Cypriot authorities.

When the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany was liberated by the British 11^th Armoured Division on 15 April 1945, the BBC’s reporter Richard Dimbleby was there to record the occasion.

ITV's drama department is in overdrive at the moment, with a seemingly endless release of series with high production values and stellar casts, and the latest is The Trouble With Maggie Cole. It's a six-parter based on an idea by Dawn French (who also stars) and is written by Mark Brotherhood.