There are times us northerners watch your typical London-set big-budget BBC drama and think, well, this really is another world. Whether it’s the two-hour commutes or the estate agencies where there is so much business that nobody has time to sit and watch cat videos on YouTube, there’s little about the world of The 7.39 familiar to those of us lacking three-bedroom semi-detached suburbia and a job in the City.

So long then, Matt Smith, and thanks for all the fish fingers and custard. I’m sure I wasn’t the only fan left scratching my head as the Eleventh Doctor, clad in smoking jacket and age-enhancing makeup, played out his final scenes - not least because I checked Twitter afterwards, just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I can’t begin to imagine what your family members, tuned in through force of habit as their turkey dinners digested, must have thought.

I’m not sure whether last month’s 50th anniversary episode is to blame for setting the bar too high, or perhaps for using up all of the nostalgic call-backs and tips of the hat that arguably the finest Doctor of the modern run deserved for a send-off. Although The Time of the Doctor set out to tie up all the loose ends of the Eleventh Doctor’s story - even the ones, like the crack in Amelia Pond’s bedroom wall, that you were under the impression had already been tied - it did so not through affection but through a sense of misplaced duty. And so we got around 50 minutes of fast-paced guddle featuring the Silence, the Siege of Trenzalore and lots of people shouting, “Doctor who? Doctor WHO?” - across the universes, in fact. If we at least get to approach a new series, and a new Doctor, with this most tedious of in-jokes settled then perhaps the episode had its redeeming features after all.

With time at such a premium that episode writer and show-runner Steven Moffat couldn’t make enough time for the plot to breathe, it was hard not to resent pointless diversions like Christmas dinner with the family of Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman). This may have given the Doctor’s companion somewhere to return to every time she was sent away as surplus to requirements throughout the episode, but since the characters had never appeared before it was hard to see their tabletop banter as anything other than distraction.

Meanwhile, the Doctor was trapped - and growing older, despite the past three years of the show giving us about 700 years' worth of adventure with barely a wrinkle - in a town called Christmas, “fixing toys and fighting monsters” in the form of every iconic baddie champing at the bit to restart the Time War aborted by the actions of Smith and previous incarnations David Tennant and John Hurt during the anniversary episode. The need to resume hostilities in the most devastating war ever experienced is never satisfactorily explained, but it is the job of mystical space nun Tasha Lem (Orla Brady, above right - never satisfactorily introduced, but happy to join a long line of female supporting characters cast to flirt with the Doctor anyway) to stop it from happening.

Long story short: the rest of the Time Lords saved the day by shooting space rays through the crack in the universe and gifting the Doctor another batch of regenerations, before conveniently forgetting that the whole reason they’d been bellowing the most annoying question in the universe through said crack in the first place was to arrange for their return. All that was left was for Smith to make an affecting speech, untie his final bow tie and regenerate into a frantic-eyed, curly-haired Peter Capaldi in time for the madness to begin again.

This final scene was beautifully done and mercifully short - where predecessor Tennant managed to spend what felt like 10 years slowly dying of radiation poisoning as he bid farewell to every companion back in 2010, there was only one face Smith needed to see one last time (that brief reappearance of the faithful Amy Pond, tied to Smith’s Doctor by virtue of hers being the first face that he ever saw, enough to remind the viewer why his chemistry with Coleman has always seemed lacking).

While The Time of the Doctor had its share of great moments - among them the Castaway-style relationship the Doctor forms with a severed Cyberman head whilst left to his own devices, Clara’s apparent use of the TARDIS instead of figuring out how to work iPlayer, and the way that the show owned Smith and Karen Gillan’s need to wear wigs for their iconic roles - it ultimately suffered from too much plot and not enough character. A strange complaint for a drama, sure; but one which ultimately led to an unsatisfying send-off.

Still, those few minutes of our Twelfth, Thirteenth, or First Mark Two Doctor, for whom additional years do not appear to equal control or standoffishness, pressed all the right buttons. He’ll be back - and so, glutton for punishment that I am, will I.

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

Overleaf: watch a clip from The Time of the Doctor

The sense of an ending is a hard thing to achieve. The Paradise has garnered a loyal following over two series, and no doubt there will be viewers sad to see it depart. But unless options are still being kept open – no announcement either way seems to have surfaced from the BBC – last night’s episode looked like a finale.

Well, wasn't that fantastic? Three Doctors; guest appearances from just about every fan favourite you could think of and enough in-jokes to satisfy even the most committed Whovian. Plus, anybody whose interests incorporate the musical career of one John Barrowman certainly wouldn’t have been disappointed.

I’m talking, of course, about The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, a half-hour Red Button special written and directed by fifth Doctor Peter Davison. This little treat, intended to reward those of us with the dedication to sit through the truly terrible Doctor Who Live: The Afterparty on BBC Three, featured Davison and his successors Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy trying to right the injustice that resulted in them being left out of the 50th anniversary special episode. With so many laughs, whether they succeeded or not is irrelevant.

Allowing the current Doctor to come to terms with adulthood again paves the way for Peter Capaldi’s entry as the 13thBesides, it’s hard to imagine that showrunner Steven Moffat could have crammed much more into The Day of the Doctor, a near-perfect opus that will likely be remembered as some of his finest work when the time comes for him to hand over the reins of Doctor Who. (Incidentally, although I have always come down firmly on the side of avoidance when it comes to spoilers, I have come to the conclusion that it is nigh-on impossible to do in this case. So, for those of you who were waiting for the verdict of theartsdesk before picking up the episode on iPlayer - let those five stars down the right-hand side be your guide, and we will speak again in 75 minutes.)

The special incorporated the last two doctors, Matt Smith and David Tennant, the latter slipping effortlessly into the quirks and tropes that defined his tenure as if he had never been away. Casting screen legend John Hurt as the forgotten "War Doctor" was also an inspired choice, even if it was hard to escape the nagging feeling that most of his lines would have worked just as well - and, perhaps, were originally written - in the Northern tones of one Christopher Eccleston.

That said, if Moffat had pulled off the ultimate coup and tempted back the Whoniverse’s original conscientious objector I daresay we wouldn’t have received such a convincing explanation for the recent trend towards the Doctor’s ever-more youthful appearance with each regeneration. Transported from the middle of the last day of the Time War, in the style of A Christmas Carol, to be shown the man he will become by a weapon so terrible it has developed its own consciousness - which it has chosen to manifest in the shape of Billie Piper - Hurt’s Doctor meets his future selves for the first time in a wood in Elizabethan England. Here, he rips into the whimsy - sandshoes, “dicky bows” and ridiculous catchphrases - which have come to define the Doctor since the 2005 reboot. It becomes obvious that “the man who regrets and the man who forgets” have thrown themselves so completely into the character of the mad man with the blue box because to do otherwise would mean embracing an adulthood in which genocide of their own people was the only choice.

The Gallifrey that we see in The Day of the Doctor - a chaotic, war-stricken hell; full of suffering, screaming children and close to rubble - is at odds with the portrayal of the power-hungry Time Lords led by Timothy Dalton’s Rassilon in David Tennant’s final episodes. On that occasion Tennant’s Doctor reaffirms that he had no choice but to push the button. By the end of The Day of the Doctor, it’s a choice that all three versions of the man have embraced - before, in the style that has come to define Moffat’s tenure, Smith’s version finds a way around it.

In the end, the Elizabethan England thread of the story was a plot device only necessary to show the effectiveness of a plan 400 years in the making - the be-suckered Zygons waiting for Earth to be "worthy" of invasion versus the centuries that the Doctor has had to mull over another way to resolve the Time War - as well as to give Tennant another pretty lady to kiss, in the form of Joanna Page’s Elizabeth I (pictured with Tennant). Stored inside paintings in the National Gallery, the shape-shifting beasties emerge into present-day London and promptly take the forms of UNIT staff, including Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave). Deep underground in the Black Vault, the Doctors force humans and Zygons to negotiate by wiping enough of their memories so that they can no longer tell which is which - preventing the humans from detonating a nuclear warhead under London to destroy the Zygons, or killing millions to save billions in a mirror of the Doctor’s own choice four hundred years ago.

Seeing the men that he will become gives Hurt’s Doctor the impetus he needs to go through with the destruction of Gallifrey, while getting to know their former self allows Tennant and Smith’s versions to accept, and collude in, that choice. Until Clara (Jenna Coleman) steps in and insists that there has to be another way - a way which involves all of the Doctor’s past selves, plus his future self (because who could resist?) doing something with their TARDISes which may or may not have made Gallifrey disappear, to be kept safe - possibly - inside a painting.

Whether or not the humourless Time Lords, whose demise was perhaps the wisest choice Russell T Davies made when originally rebooting the series, have actually survived - and what the consequences of that could be - now remains to be seen as the show moves forward. It’s a clever trick which, as the previous Doctors will not remember it - and Smith’s has only discovered it now - does not negate or rewrite anything that has gone before but gives the show a fresh new direction. And allowing the current Doctor to come to terms with adulthood again paves the way for Peter Capaldi’s entry as the 13th, and possibly - but surely not - final Doctor at Christmas. If the rest of his tenure is as exciting as those five seconds of his eyebrows there’s plenty to look forward to.

All this, plus all the in-jokes and winks you’d expect from an anniversary episode including the original title sequence; the opening scene at Coal Hill School; Tennant’s final words as the Doctor - again - and a Tom Baker cameo. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to watch it again…

Overleaf: watch The Day of the Doctor trailer

No one seemed quite sure whether it’s a journey of 60 miles or 40 from Harrogate to Halifax, but we’re going to be seeing a lot of the M62 in this second series of Last Tango in Halifax. It’s a journey in more senses than one, leading from the genteel prosperity of the former, where you’re expecting arrivals from an Ayckbourn or a Bennett play any moment, to a rural farm outside the latter, where the grim atmosphere rather resembles The Village (okay, pushing that a bit).

Proof that the BBC’s love of gritty realism is not solely the province of Luther and similar modern-day urban crime dramas comes just minutes into the second series of Ripper Street, before the credits even roll. In the East End of London a police officer is thrown from a window, only missing a little boy playing recorder for the amusement of the street below when his leg is gruesomely impaled on a railing.

“Everything has happened so quickly,” Katherine Glendenning mused as the new series of The Paradise shot off the block. She'd been en voyage for a year, losing a father and gaining a husband, but now Katherine was back. Moray’s melancholy sojourn on coffee and cognac in Paris – “thoroughly French in every way,” he found it, with less originality than we might have expected – had been suddenly cut short too, and he was hot-footing it back to the waiting arms of Denise. The dramatic rapiers were drawn.

In some ways Malachi Davies, one of the titular “truckers” in this new BBC comedy drama, brings to mind Frank Gallagher of Shameless. Admittedly Davies, played by Stephen Tompkinson, has a job - but it is a job that is as central to the identity of the character as Gallagher’s avoidance of one ever was. Some of the similarities are pretty superficial: the two characters share the love for a drink, a seeming inability to get a decent haircut and even an ex played by Maggie O’Neill.

Ancient Greece has been having a bit of a run lately what with Dr Michael Scott’s recent primers on Greek culture and society and the like. There are, however, certain parts of the television audience a Hellenistic scholar cannot reach, and they are to be found on a sofa looking for something to watch between Strictly and Casualty. In the event that such viewers choose not to gorge on The X Factor, they can now opt to spend time in Atlantis. Or should that be "Atlantis"?

Coming to it fresh, it’s hard to imagine Father Figure as the Radio 2 serial it apparently began life as. The first episode of the six-part series is driven by what some would call "visual gags" or "physical comedy", as if writer and star Jason Byrne was so excited by the new medium that he decided to throw everything he could at the camera to see what stuck.