“The problem is that you’ve been told and not told.” While Ishiguro and his discerning fans would never indulge in anything so crass as hype, there have been whisperings in North London wine bars, over the coffee-morning brews of Home Counties ladies, on terraces of rented villas on the Amalfi Coast. Yes, Never Let Me Go is the one about human cloning, whose characters are living organ farms, existing solely for harvest.

The idea of the suburban superhero isn't exactly a road not taken in the annals of TV history. We've had Heroes, Misfits, and even Ardal O'Hanlon as Thermoman in My Hero, not to mention generationally recurring stuff like Bewitched and The Bionic Woman.

Now that The Walking Dead has been nominated for a Writers Guild of America award for Best New Series, executive producer Frank Darabont and his team must be ruing the fact that series one comprised only six episodes. A 13-part second season will probably air next October, by when its halo of success may have dimmed significantly.

Don’t you hate it when you have weeks like the ones poor Sean Walker, played by mini-Tom Cruise Jason Ritter, has been having? You go on a relaxing Caribbean cruise with your bride-to-be Leila (Sarah Roemer), you get friendly with another couple, then find out they're part of a huge conspiracy and have just kidnapped your fiancée. Then you discover that any trace of your presence on the cruise ship has been erased.

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.

Obviously the world has decided it needs Mark Gatiss, and it keeps finding things for him to do. An influential figure in the latterday revival of Doctor Who, as well as co-creator of the BBC's recent Sherlock, Gatiss's forte is turning out to be whimsical old-fashioned adventure stories, perhaps overlaid with a patina of science fiction.

There may be some who feel this year’s shortlist for the Turner Prize has done little to forge ahead with anything new, innovative and different. And then there may be others who will welcome the rather more established artists on this year’s list, that is those who have continued to steadily develop their practice for well over a decade, with no great surprises, such as Angela de La Cruz and Dexter Dalwood.

What sound does a screaming foetus make? It’s not the kind of question that most theatre plays provoke you to ask, but Mike Bartlett’s new piece about climate change is not a normal play. At the end of the first half of this rollercoasting epic, dazzlingly directed by Enron maestro Rupert Goold and which opened last night, the image of a foetus crying out in the womb seems perfectly reasonable. It’s that kind of show; fuelled by a wildly imaginative vision, when it ignites it burns like phosphorous. And, believe me, that changes your perceptions.

Wasn't The Deep the title of a 1970s movie starring Jacqueline Bisset and Nick Nolte? Something about sunken treasure and a stash of morphine off the coast of Bermuda. I have a hunch it may have been complete twaddle. No less preposterous is this five-part subaqueous saga from the BBC, in which a team of marine scientists take their research submarine, the Orpheus, into frozen Arctic waters to investigate the catastrophic wreck of another sub, the Hermes.

Although it has taken over a decade to come to fruition, Splice still feels like a timely piece of work with its macabre and gruesome take on notions of genetic mutation for commercial gain and the god-like delusions of the scientific community. In addition, it spits out poisonous barbs in the direction of dysfunctional parents who visit their own inadequacies on their hapless offspring.