If anybody is daft enough to argue that the television licence fee isn't worth it, then just usher them before this superb mockumentary, brought to you by the team behind Twenty Twelve.
Crime drama at its best not only offers a satisfying mystery and characters with whom we want to spend time, but a strong sense of place, a location that captures our imagination and makes us want to know more. Little wonder then that the BBC snapped up the rights to Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Quartet of novels featuring Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, the Scottish cop with the Spanish ancestor. With its authentic Shetland locations, Raven Black (the first of three two-part stories) was beautiful to look at.
It may seem strange that something we do every day of our lives – talking – is an incredibly difficult thing to put in a televisual setting, and the list of those who have tried to do a chat show and failed to make an impact is long. Davina McCall, Gaby Roslin, Ruth Jones, to name just a few - despite having real talent in broadcasting and comedy – have crashed and burned when given a sofa and a bunch of people they've never met before to have a natter with.
In its infancy back in 1997, Jonathan Creek felt fresh and inventive, with clever little swipes at the entertainment industry and a new take on crime drama: not who or why, but more of a howdunnit. Its star Alan Davies, he of the duffel coat and the tumbling hair, was rather good at narrowing his eyes and staring into space while we let our hot chocolate go cold waiting to discover not only who carried out one of those incredibly theatrical murders, but to see its baffling mechanism unpicked.
In between the second series of Silk and this new one, Peter Moffat took time out to write his rural-misery-and-cannon-fodder dirge, The Village. Having off-roaded so far from his usual track, perhaps it's no wonder that his return to the world of wigs, hypocrisy and legal sophistry felt a fraction off the pace.
As the Brockman family returns for a fifth and final series of Outnumbered, some viewers will find their hackles standing to attention at the family's extraordinary distillation of middle-class characterstics. There’s the enviable middle-class London home they live in, absurdly beyond the means of a family that seems to subsist on a single teacher’s income. There’s the tameness of their problems, this week's revolving around angst-ridden secondary school choice and the horror provoked by the eldest child Jake's (Tyger Drew-Honey) tattoo.
If it ain't broke don't fix it, and writer Heidi Thomas obviously has no intention of tinkering with the Call the Midwife formula. Virtually nothing has changed, except that there's a new character, Sister Winifred, while Chummy (Miranda Hart) is now living with her husband PC Noakes (Ben Caplan) and has a baby son. However, you can't keep a born midwife down, and Chummy's return to the Nonnatus House mothership by the end of the episode was a foregone conclusion.
Well, that was a shock. I can’t remember seeing many crows around on the Caribbean island of Saint-Marie that is the location of Death in Paradise, but assuming there are some they should by now be appropriately stoned.
As Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock reached the end of its latest brief span, Timeshift [****] surveyed the history of dramatic interpretations of Baker Street's finest with a wry eye, in a narrative sprinkled with nutritious facts and anecdotes.
If you’re a channel trying to prove that there is life in a tired old format, it’s hard to think of a more effective way than signing up Kylie Minogue. It’s tough for a telly talent show to make an impact in those early weeks, before the audience has warmed enough to the contestants to begin rooting for them or otherwise, but the prospect of will.i.am serenading the diminutive diva during the judges’ opening medley of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” and “I Predict a Riot” was reason enough to tune in to the third series of The Voice.