Unlike audio recordings, classical DVDs can only be properly taken in if you're sitting down for 80 minutes, ideally in the same seat. So they have to be pretty special to warrant repeated viewings. So much depends on the production and direction; how to make interesting the sight of a middle-aged bloke waving a stick at a sea of other middle-aged blokes, many of them looking as if they'd rather be somewhere else. Here's a selection of things which have lodged in my conciousness over the past year, including a couple of seasonal discs.

In truth this probably deserves one star rather than two but it’s all about expectations, isn’t it. A Yuletide outing from the professional bumpkins who hit big in 1976 with "I've Got a Brand New Combine Harvester", replete with a dopey-eyed cartoon cow angel floating on the cover and Christmas dinner on the CD itself, is hardly claiming to be vanguard art. If you buy this, you know what you’re getting – daft yokelised versions of creaky Christmas perennials.

Tommy Tiernan Crooked Man (Pias Comedy)

That a tale confronting society’s most pernicious evils, giving poverty a human face and desperation a voice, should become a cornerstone of the British festive experience is perhaps unexpected: testimony either to the moral deviance of the general public, or alternatively to Charles Dickens’s peerless skill as a writer. Personally I’m inclined toward the latter, and judging by the massed hordes at the Arts Theatre on Saturday for Simon Callow’s new staging of A Christmas Carol, I’m not alone.

Loneliness is hard to put on stage. There is something about the feeling of unwanted urban solitude which is so repetitive and, let’s face it, boring, that writing a play about it risks sending the audience into the night before the story is properly over. So the first thing to say about Lucinda Coxon’s play, which was first staged in Bath a year ago and now makes a welcome appearance in London, is that it is compelling and never boring. In fact, it has that strange kind of intensity that leaves you feeling completely shell-shocked at the end of the evening.

There are plenty of recent examples of videogenic movie stars embarking on questionable musical pursuits, from Keanu Reeves to Scarlett Johansson, to name two whose rhythmic careers should have been throttled at birth. Zooey Deschanel, Hollywood's go-to kook, has actually recorded some remarkably pretty music. Volume One, her debut album with M Ward, the other half of She & Him, was as fine an example of tweetastic vintage-store pop as you would come across this side of Belle & Sebastian. Cute as a kitten and just as playful.

No more is dance the preserve of the few sitting in the theatre - larger companies are leaping hungrily for TV and now cinema screens, having found various ways around the longstanding obstacle of copyright. The BBC is experimenting with live 3D cinema for Saturday's Strictly Come Dancing final, the Royal Ballet is beaming Thursday's performance of The Sleeping Beauty live to the world's cinemas.

So, Christmas again then. Ho ho ho. It comes around every year. Cards, crackers, baubles, TV specials. And panto. I am a playwright. I write mostly for children and their families. I tend not to say I'm a children's writer because it's rare that a child has made the decision to come to one of my plays. A parent, teacher or loving adult has made that decision and forked out the money. Children can't access my work by turning on the telly or going to the library. So all my writing is of necessity aimed at two audiences.

The Nutcracker, if this isn’t too much of a mixed culinary metaphor, divides audiences like Marmite: love it or hate it. Usually it’s the critics who hate it, and for them it is often only the annual round of Nuts to be Cracked that wears on the soul. It is hard to imagine, otherwise, that anyone with functioning ears can fail to be thrilled as what is arguably Tchaikovsky’s greatest orchestral work begins to swell from the pit.

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.