If nothing else, this second series of Jed Mercurio's brutalist police thriller has done wonders for Keeley Hawes. Not that she was in much need of a career pick-me-up, but the way her haunted portrayal of the much-abused DI Lindsay Denton has brooded over the story like a funeral shroud deserves to land her a few gongs and is doubtless already bringing in heaps of job offers. 

We have already seen a lot of World War I on television this year, and clearly we’re going to be getting a great deal more before it's out. Whether it’s a “celebration” season, or the diametrical opposite, or just that looser term, commemoration, is something each individual viewer will have to decide for themselves.

Crikey. Line of Duty was pumping dangerous levels of octane first time round. For this new series we’re in for an overdose. After one hour the body count is racking up: 3 coppers (shot), 1 witness under protection (burned to a crisp), AN Other (defenestrated). Plus that lovely soft Keeley Hawes has been waterboarded in the lav and has assaulted a noisy neighbour with a wine bottle. If it’s cheering up you need, best retreat to Call the Midwife, where they have window latches you can trust.

The League of Gentlemen – performers Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, and co-writer Jeremy Dyson – have been rather busy since they left Royston Vasey behind (temporarily we're told, as the foursome may set up shop for local people again next year). Dyson has recently been script-editing The Wrong Mans, while Gatiss has been busy appearing in Sherlock and Coriolanus, among other things. Now Reece and Shearsmith follow up their wonderful Psychoville with Inside No 9.

World War One overkill - if you'll pardon the expression - is a clear and present danger as the centenary commemorations gather pace, but this investigation of the roles of the interlinked royal families of Europe in the onrush of hostilities was as good a chunk of TV history as I can remember. Informative and detailed but always keeping an eye on the bigger picture, it made me, at any rate, start to think about the road to 1914 in a different light.

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's fans recall with huge affection their previous collaborations – among them Big Night Out and The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, two wonderfully anarchic shows. Now comes their first traditional, one-room (well two actually) sitcom House of Fools, which, true to form, is a mix of physical comedy, bawdy humour, surreal sight gags and utter nonsense.

Did we really ever have it quite so bad? One-off drama Legacy, the latest addition to the BBC’s Cold War season, took us back to 1974, civil unrest, power-cuts and the three-day-week. And in Spyland, that nether world of lost certainties and perennial jadedness, the weather’s rarely great anyway. So the lack of sun in Paula Milne’s tight and nuanced adaptation of the Alan Judd novel was no surprise: the clouds of le Carré were lowering.

Of all the ways in which the BBC has chosen to mark the 50th anniversary of one of its most celebrated exports, surely this (other than the obvious) was the most anticipated: a feature-length retelling of the origin story of Doctor Who, written and executive produced by some of the same names behind the show’s current run.

Today’s special preview of the impending 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who finally filled in some of what happened in the gap between Paul McGann’s 1996 made-for-TV movie and the show’s 2005 televisual regeneration (Big Finish audios notwithstanding, obviously). So it was appropriate that today’s other Who-related event, a one-off tie-in documentary fronted by Professor Brian Cox, began by doing its best to bridge the gap between its presenter’s time in 90s dance-pop band D:Ream and his own unlikely regeneration as one of TV science’s most famous personalities.

There are plenty of aspects of Doctor Who worth examining through a scientific lensPersonally, I’d happily watch an hour of back-and-forth between Cox and current Doctor Matt Smith - their short scenes, interspersing the rest of the show’s lecture format, were a joy to watch - but the show had unfortunately promised Proper Science, with the usual celebrity guests, rather than a jaunt in the TARDIS. Thankfully Cox is an engaging lecturer, which seems as good an explanation as any for why the majority of those celebrity guests remained stuck to their seats throughout.

Cox began, as all good lecturers do, by setting out his thesis - by the end of his allotted hour, he wanted to demonstrate whether it was or was not possible to travel in time just like the Doctor. With all of space and time to choose from, his goal was modest - Dr Michael Faraday’s Christmas Lecture on the chemical history of the candle from 1860, given in the same building from which he was addressing his audience. Faraday’s theories popped up again throughout, as did those of Albert Einstein and Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, whose ‘Fermi Paradox’ is the apparent contradiction between the likelihood of the existence of extraterrestrial life and the fact that we on Earth have not yet seen any evidence of said life.

There are plenty of aspects of Doctor Who worth examining through a scientific lens - I for one would love to see a few of those times the Doctor saved the day armed with nothing more than his trusty sonic screwdriver debunked - so it was a bit of a shame that Cox’s lecture focused solely on the big questions: those of time travel and alien life. Though Cox and his volunteers (former Bang Goes the Theory man Dallas Campbell, Charles Dance, Professor Jim Al-Khalili and comedian Rufus Hound) were able to recreate some of the science through simple on-stage experiments, there was no chance that we were going to meet a genuine Martian by the lecture’s end or that Cox would be able to have a cup of tea with his beloved Faraday and be home in time for supper.

By 10pm we had learned that it was theoretically possible to travel into the future, if you didn’t mind a 10-year detour around outer space, that a former pop star with a considerable IQ needs to have LSD jokes explained to him and that, if you were going to throw Rufus Hound out of the universe through a black hole - or at least a convincing picture of one - you’d never actually see him disappear. Whether the rather complex science had stuck was another matter - but it was certainly an interesting, and fun, place to start.

• Doctor Who: The Return of Doctor Mysterio reviewed on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the latest trailer for Dr Who 50th Anniversary celebrations on Saturday 23rd November

The last time we saw soldiers going over the top at the Somme with comic baggage attached was the tragic finale of Blackadder. It’s the inevitable comparison that The Wipers Times writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman were going to face, and though they aim for something different in what is, after all, a true story, there’s no escaping the same absurdity of clipped understatement that they have given their British officer heroes, or the essential one-dimensional nature of characterisation.