One day this all will be over. Give it half a century. In 50 years' time, there will be documentaries in which today’s young, by then old, will explain to generations yet unborn exactly how and why Britain went round the twist in 2016.

The facts of Escape at Dannemora (Sky Atlantic) are notorious in America. Convicted murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Indeed a less enquiring version of the story might have been called Escape from Dannemora. But the preposition is key.

Sarah Phelps’s annual reboot of a canonical murder mystery by Agatha Christie has rapidly established itself as a Christmas staple of TV drama.

There was a ruthless logic to the scheduling of The Long Song (BBC One). Broadcast over three consecutive nights, this fleet-footed adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel set during the era of abolition in 19th-century Jamaica swiftly gathered momentum and proceeded at pace towards (praise be) a charming denouement.

You wouldn’t turn to Jimmy McGovern for a drawing-room comedy, but there’s no doubting his gift for seizing big issues and turning into them raw, bleeding chunks of drama. You’re either for him or against him, but if you’re against him he’d love to grab you by the throat and shake you into seeing it his way.

Was The Little Drummer Girl commissioned by algorithm? Those who liked The Night Manager might reasonably have been supposed to enjoy another le Carré adaptation. The two dramas had DNA in common.

There’s no one right way to grieve. It cuts through everyone differently, whether reverting to childhood traits or out-of-character impulses. The person you lose might mean one thing to you, and something completely different to someone else; it can hit you both differently, and equally hard.

And now for something completely different from The Fall. The nerve-shredding drama from Northern Ireland was written by Allan Cubitt and featured, as its resident psychopathic hottie, Jamie Dornan (pictured below).

Destiny is all. The first two series of The Last Kingdom debuted on BBC Two, but for series three it has been fully embraced by Netflix. Global domination surely looms, since these latest exploits of Uhtred, the warrior who was born a Saxon but raised by Vikings, find the show hitting new peaks of throat-slitting, skull-crushing action and intense personal drama.

This opening episode of My Brilliant Friend was a stunning symphony in grey.