Three years after it was, as they say, "let go" by ITV, The South Bank Show, with Melvyn Bragg at the helm, is set to return on Sky Arts in 2012. The idea has been in the wind since Sky Arts revived The South Bank Show Awards in January this year, but the news was formally announced yesterday (30 November). Reflecting on a television career that began in 1963 when he landed a job as "Ken Russell's gofer", Bragg said that making arts television was what he'd always wanted to do and remains his passion.

This series of supernatural dramas from the early 1980s is the sort of thing that could very easily be parodied – has been parodied, in fact, by everyone from Victoria Wood and French and Saunders to The League of Gentlemen and Garth Merenghi's Darkplace. Every shonky visual effect, every discordant stab of strings as the camera's point of view creeps up behind a character, every window that blows open extinguishing a candle: these are meat and potatoes to sketch writers, and this makes it hard to watch these episodes with a straight face... at first.

Your Macbeth opens in the round, tailored to a small studio theatre. In entrusting it to television, do you engage someone experienced in the medium to render faithfully the spaces and the talking heads, as Trevor Nunn did for the deservedly legendary McKellen-Dench double act? Or do you cry your own havoc and let slip the dogs of all your favourite film directors, as happens in Rupert Goold’s ambitious TV transfer?

Watching bookaholic punters tramping down windswept country lanes in hiking boots, anoraks and rucksacks instantly alerts you to the singular quality of the Hay Festival, though it's surprising that nobody has grasped the glaring opportunity to set up a tent selling Alfred Wainwright's fell-walking guides and Kendal Mint Cake. But where else can you find such a high density of starry names and media taste-makers in a soggy field on the Welsh border?

When Treme debuted on HBO in the States, some excitable critics watched the pilot episode and instantly proclaimed it a masterpiece superior even to The Wire. David Simon, who created both shows, may have been delighted. Or on the other hand, he might have wondered how anybody could assess a complex, long-term portrayal of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina so categorically on so brief an acquaintance.

Sky hasn't generally been synonymous with top TV drama, but its new channel, Sky Atlantic HD, is aiming to change that. Launching on 1 February, the channel has been built around Sky's deal with the American HBO network, which means viewers will get access to the entire history of The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City and The Wire.

The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that mere biographical detail doesn’t - but appropriately enough the grim Gothic writer’s eyes are more black holes than windows on the soul, and they give nothing away. The horrors, scandals and tragedies of Poe’s life had to be exhumed from his words, and the words of those who came into his orbit.

“Henry VIII is the only king whose shape we remember,” David Starkey tells us in the first of a new series of “polemical essays” on British art. To demonstrate, he reduces the king’s form to its bare Cubist geometry. He sketches a trapezoid for the chest – an impressive 54 inches in life, as attested by his made-to-measure suit of armour; two “chicken-wing” triangles for the puffed sleeves; two simple parallel lines for the wide-apart legs. Oh, and a small, inverted triangle for the codpiece. This last addition, as originally drawn-in for comedic value by the Tudor historian G R Elton, and fondly recalled, never failed to raise a titter amongst the callow students of Dr Starkey’s Cambridge undergraduate days.

For the couch-bound classical music lover, keeping up with the Proms is pretty straightforward. Step one: open bottle of agreeable claret. Step two: turn on Radio 3 and listen, or watch selected Proms on BBC Two or BBC Four. Or, indeed, catch up on the iPlayer. But needless to say, there's a colossal amount of work going on behind the scenes to make it all happen.