This week brings a tale of two comedies. Both half-hour sitcoms are about widowed mothers with grown-up sons still at home. Each woman has an unattached admirer. Both shows star fine comic actresses who learned much of their craft in the films of Mike Leigh. And the new series started two days apart. On BBC One was Hold the Sunset. Back for a second series on BBC Two was Mum.

Colours had meanings for Emil Nolde. “Yellow can depict happiness and also pain. Red can mean fire, blood or roses; blue can mean silver, the sky or a storm.” As the son of a German-Frisian father and a Schleswig-Dane mother, Nolde was raised in a pious household on the windswept flat land on the border on Germany and Denmark that his family farmed.

Roll up, dépêchez-vous, for Carmen the - what? Circus? Vaudeville/music-hall/cabaret? Opéra-ballet, post-Rameau? Not, certainly, a show subject to the kind of updated realism which has been applied by just about every production other than the previous two at Covent Garden.

You haven't lived until you've witnessed Viennese maverick H(einz) K(arl) Gruber – 75 today (3 January, publication day) – speech-singing, conducting and kazooing his way through his self-styled "pandemonium" Frankenstein!!. Composed for chansonnier and chamber ensemble or large orchestra, it's a contemporary classic nearly 40 years young.

Over the last few months Paloma Faith has been talking up her fourth album, The Architect. There were self-perpetuated rumours of her rockin’ out, going off at a completely fresh musical angle, with lyrical content that sidestepped pop's usual concerns in favour of tackling societal issues and the state of things in our fucked-up world. Sounded good. However, a couple of clips of chatting about our duty to the welfare state and such, one featuring the writer Owen Jones, does not a political album make. In fact The Architect is business as usual, a continuation of the last album and not really very different from it at all.

Since she first appeared eight years ago, Paloma Faith has been the freaky-deaky theatrical alternative for girl-pop lovers, neither as raw as Adele or as plastic (and sex-obsessed) as Rihanna. She’s a very British sort of pop star, a colourful eccentric, deeply dipped in art and cabaret traditions, also inclined towards old-fashioned pre-rock’n’roll ideals of popular music. The Architect is lathered in orchestral bombast, assisted by David Arnold, with other contributors including ultra-mainstream super-producers/songwriters such as Sia, Starsmith and Jesse Shatkin. Apart from opening with a Samuel L Jackson monologue, the album’s first half is, then, rather predictable, with Seventies-LA-Motown opulence on cuts such “I’ll Be Gentle” and “Crybaby” (the former featuring John Legend), and Amy Winhouse-meets-Shirley Bassey epics like “Guilty”, alongside the giganto-pop monster “Warrior”.

However, during the album’s second half Faith hits a gold run of tunes, notably the funkin’ furious – and possibly even loosely political! – “WW3”, the chugging and vast “Still Around”, and the beatsy, solid Memphis-style soul-pop of “Lost and Lonely”. The Architect, then, is not exactly a departure from anything Paloma Faith has done in the past, which is a shame as she clearly has the creative potential to push boundaries, but for those who already count themselves as fans, there’s enough to here please.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Crybaby" by Paloma Faith

Ten years ago Brighton band 12 Stone Toddler burst onto the scene with two off-the-wall albums of madly inventive pop-rock. They then vamoosed back out of existence. Now they’re back, preparing a third album for the Freshly Squeezed label, and playing a packed home town gig. The second song they do is a new one, “Piranha” and it shows they’re no nearer normal. It’s a jagged, shouty thing with a catchy chorus about there being piranhas in the water, half football chant, half King Crimson. It’s edgy, deliberately bizarre, and oddly approachable, fun by way of musical obtuseness, just like the band who wrote it.

There have been changes. While wry, pork-pie-hatted frontman Chris Otero and ponytailed keyboard whizz Ben Jones remain from their last incarnation, female guitarist Helen Durden (pictured below) is a new addition, as is drummer Robin O’Keeffe. Clad in a red, sparkly sequinned top, Durden maintains a deadpan face until near the end of the gig, even when playing intricate solos, then she finally splits into a grin, recognizing friends in the crowd. Behind the band is a large screen initially showing their logo, which has an eyeball peering from the "O" of "STONE", then a series of suitably surreal film clips throughout the performance. It’s the only adornment and, after a late start, due to soundcheck faffing with the keyboards, they slam straight into “Come Back”, the punchy opener from their 2007 debut album Does It Scare You?

One of the main ingredients of 12 Stone Toddler’s sound is 1970s prog-rock. Please don’t run off screaming, I dislike prog as much as the next ELP-loathing post-punker, but this band take the style’s perverse stop-start dynamics and sudden time signature flips, and mash them into their own, unique, tuneful gumbo of burlesque fairground sounds, Balkan tints, psychedelia, reggae and so on. They are, in fact, more like an experimental version of Madness than they are prime-time Yes. That said, they stack the first half of their set with a more than necessary share of musically awkward material, as well as a run of new songs which means it takes longer than it should to build a mutual groove with the audience.

By the time they do settle, the partisan local crowd is jigging and welcome a catchy selection of tunes that includes a persuasive dub affair, whose title I didn't catch, and the contagious brilliance of “Candles on the Cake”, a joyfully doomed celebration of the descent into old age (“Some people say, we're not getting older, we're just getting better”), before ending with the piano-led stomper “The Ballad of Al Coholic”, which has a celebratory Tankus the Henge-ish air of Glastonbury’s far flung fields about it. By this point Otero is chatting happily with the crowd and indicates that his band are not going to go off properly before an encore. Instead Durden disappears briefly behind the speaker stack, then she returns equally promptly and they dive into their best-known single, “The Rabbit”, a galloping jazz-jive of theatrical rock’n’roll that causes mass outbreaks of enthusiastic leaping about.

12 Stone Toddler’s return is a welcome reminder that predictability is not an essential quality in guitar bands, and that experimentalism can still be pop. They have some work to do before their live show thoroughly welcomes non-fans, but its second half showed they’re well on the way.

• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Watch the video for "Candles on the Cake" by 12 Stone Toddler

"An Evening with Pink Martini" consists of two sets by the Portland, Oregon group/mini-orchestra. Of these, the first takes the prize, but only by a very short lead. During it the nine-piece, led by Thomas Lauderdale at the piano, seem to relax and really allow spontaneity to take hold, in a manner that’s both risky and thrilling, in terms of stagecraft. At one point trombonist Antonis Andreou is coaxed to sing a number in Greek that he can hardly remember, which means moments of quiet conflab with lead singer Storm Large.

Tom Lehrer famously declared satire dead when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger not long after he'd bombed Cambodia back to the Middle Ages. Lehrer never wrote another song. Meanwhile other satirists battle on. Every day delivers fresh material to work with. This documentary supplied a little more by rummaging around on Donald Trump's family tree.

It would take a brave soul to mention Peter Mullan and “national treasure” in the same breath. To start with, he’d be more than clear which nation has his allegiance, and then suggest, in the gentlest possible way, that maybe he was, well, a wee bit young for any such honorifics...