The Beatles’s arrival on US TV screens in February 1964 is usually recognised as the beginning of the British Invasion of America. But this drama, focusing on chippy, upstart photographer David Bailey, his relationship with his chosen model Jean Shrimpton and their first shoot in Manhattan, floated the idea that their US visit in January 1962 was as pivotal as The Fabs’s debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

As the series ended, it remained at great pains to repeatedly point out that this was the story of the British musical, its post-War success and how Oliver and Jesus Christ Superstar conquered Broadway. Yet it was hard not to sigh as episode three finished with Disney and Sir Cameron Mackintosh cosying up to stage Mary Poppins, which Mackintosh had the rights to. Universal hit Britain’s stages with Wicked, as DreamWorks has with Shrek The Musical. The story of the British musical concluded with corporate America moving in.

theartsdesk’s Howard Male pointed out that The Slap was overshadowed by BBC Four’s concurrent screening of The Killing. The arrival of the series on DVD brings an opportunity to brush off the lint that might have stuck to it and consider whether it will have a staying power. Will it become a box-set essential?

Knitwear fetishists won’t be as thrilled with Borgen as they were with The Killing, but based on the first two episodes of the Danish political drama, Birgitte Nyborg Christensen is a match for Sarah Lund. She’s as likely to stray from what she ought to be doing as Lund and just as adept as spotting what no else can see.

While the rest of the country has been busy discussing the knitwear of Denmark’s answer to DCI Jane Tennison, I found myself bereft of anyone to share my unbridled enthusiasm for this Australian adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap. Even at the virtual watercooler of Facebook, only one person gave me a thumbs up when I wrote a paragraph on its excellence. Why a fairly generic murder procedural should inspire such obsessive devotion while a completely original and gripping family drama is relatively ignored is something of a mystery.

Before the internet and the Kindle were invented, generations of Americans saw their lives refracted through the pages of Life magazine. In particular, through its photography, since writers at Life were largely relegated to supplying glorified picture captions. They were also allowed to carry the photographers' equipment.

It’s a song which hangs in the air like pollen or reefer smoke, before gradually rising like a never-to-be-answered prayer. It began life as a lullaby but grew up to be a protest song, a scream of existential angst and even a purred invitation to sex. It’s a song like no other song, in that it has been covered more than any other song (its nearest competitors being “My Way” and “Yesterday”), and it was written by three Jewish immigrants before eventually being adopted by African-Americans as their own.

People speak to her. It could be her mother. It could be a colleague. But she doesn’t react, continues what she’s doing. Which, usually, is leaving. It’s welcome back to Sarah Lund, whose watchability is in inverse proportion to her demonstrativeness. As recalcitrant detective Lund, in the second series of Denmark’s The Killing, Sofie Gråbøl is as magnetic as the first time around, whatever she’s wearing. Sweaters be damned, these two opening episodes were up there with the BAFTA-winning first series.

For dull reasons to do with a dodgy digital box and a very old analogue telly, I can’t tune in to BBC Four during live transmissions, so I either catch up on iPlayer, or (lucky me as a journalist) get to see programmes early. But I’m very glad I can get it at all, for when the BBC cuts come to pass and its premier arts channel starts broadcasting archive-only material, as it proposes to do, then I think I might just stop watching telly altogether.

Marking Pearl Jam's two decades together, long-time fan and ex-Rolling Stone writer Cameron Crowe has assembled the two-hour documentary Pearl Jam Twenty, due for an airing on BBC Four this Friday (11 November). It's a project which he's had in mind for years, and the effort which has gone into it is obvious from the amazing range and variety of footage, most of it previously unseen. Every phase of the band's career, and even pre-career, is covered, going back to their roots in mid-Eighties Seattle before anybody had heard of "grunge".