Diehard Morsians have been harbouring murderous thoughts ever since it was announced. No doubt they communicate these to one another in fiendish acrostics and cryptic clues. It was one thing giving Lewis his own spin-off, quite another to bring Morse back to life in the form of a prequel. The heretical suggestion of Endeavour is that the grumpy old sleuth did not in fact spring fully formed into the world in the shape of John Thaw, with that slow world-weary lope and a withering glare lurking in those iridescent peepers.

2011 was an excellent year for highly original music from female musicians, two of whom brandished ukuleles yet found quite different ways of using them.

This is probably cheating - because it was released in 1980 - but one of the cultural highlights of my year was the opportunity to revisit the film Bad Timing, which was screened as part of director Nicolas Roeg’s retrospective at the BFI in March.

2011 was a year when the wheels of global history cranked noticeably forward, the news always full of images that will be in school text books within a decade. It was also the year when, for most of us, “a bit peeved” became “utterly livid” that greedy, over-privileged vermin had gambled and lost all our money and were clearly getting away with it, unhindered.

You can see why prequels come into being. A dramatic character becomes a national treasure and eventually, once old age or worse removes them from the small screen, they are opportunistically exhumed by means of the backstory. Young Delboy was brought back to life in Rock and Chips. Young Morse is expected to be solving murders soon. And now here comes Young James Herriot.

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.

It's your worst nightmare. Two WPCs appear at your door and inform you that your husband has been killed in a road accident. It doesn't help that the one doing the talking looks like the uglier sister of Macbeth's witches. Then they twist the knife by telling you that there was an unknown woman in the passenger seat, now also dead. 

It was several minutes into The National Anthem, Charlie Brooker's latest dramatic output on Channel 4 after his excellent 2008 mini-series Dead Set, a zombie-laden satire about reality television, before I laughed. I say that not as a criticism – far from from it – but as a huge compliment. For Brooker neatly confounded our expectations by making the opening scenes (shown as part of the Black Mirror season) appear as if they were part of a serious political thriller.

ITV has been cunningly trailing its Christmas bumper edition of Downton Abbey, which will feature guest stars Nigel Havers and Samantha Bond and the spectacle of Mr Bates being dragged before the beak for murdering his first wife. Now that details of the Yuletide schedules have emerged, it's clear that Downton is the one to beat on Christmas Day.

Those of a certain age have certain memories (very certain) of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, wife of the Bionic Man and not exactly unbionic herself, especially in that poster of her in the red one-piece with Seventies enormohair and fluorescent American Dream gnashers. There were a couple of others in Charlie’s Angels. One forgets their names, and indeed faces. (Feel free, scholars of the era, to write in on this.) It was revolutionary at the time: girls had been high-heeling men in the schnoz since The Avengers, but only one lady at a time.