Some of the bravest people in theatre operate in the dance world. Lloyd Newson’s new DV8 production, Can We Talk About This?, tackles just as contentious and satirically explosive a subject as Javier de Frutos did in Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez, the luridly anti-Papist work that got him death threats and a BBC ban in 2009.

Broadcast News gets reinvented for our ever more frivolous television age, alongside healthy enough dollops of Working Girl, The Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic (among others) to make Roger Michell's latest Hollywood entry seem like one long, extended pitch. That this comes from the same man who in the past year or so has directed - superlatively - Rope and Tribes on the London stage itself testifies to the divisions between the commercial and the personal, between catering to the marketplace and feeding one's soul, that this movie, in fact, is about. The film itself may not seem plausible for a single minute, but the tensions it describes could not ring more true.

Broadcast News gets reinvented for our ever more frivolous television age, alongside healthy enough dollops of Working Girl, The Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic (among others) to make Roger Michell's latest Hollywood entry seem like one long, extended pitch. That this comes from the same man who in the past year or so has directed - superlatively - Rope and Tribes on the London stage itself testifies to the divisions between the commercial and the personal, between catering to the marketplace and feeding one's soul, that this movie, in fact, is about. The film itself may not seem plausible for a single minute, but the tensions it describes could not ring more true.

And so Mad Men 4 rode into the sunset, Don perched on yet another horse (sorry, love interest), a fifth series in production, and it’s all become a soap opera rather than a drama series. It should be called Madly Men. Fast diminishing returns, one of them me, diminishing possibly to zero next time. I’d held hopes that series 4 would see Don come to the picturesque fall promised in the credit sequence, probably off a cliff far away in the wilderness where his body would lie unnoticed like an empty Lucky Strike packet. His hidden identity would tear through his careful carapace and his conscience overwhelm him. The End.

That sobbing musical theme resumes, so does that hospital-white dreamlike cartoon of a male figure tumbling in a Hitchcockian fall from grace past huge ads of poster girls. Actually it’s almost as much Milton as it is Hitchcock. I say that to be deliberately pretentious, because the secret of Mad Men’s addictive draw is the human profundity you try to read into this fascinatingly surfaced drama about an empty man who doesn’t know who he is. This is the ultimate advert for TV, a series so slick and so moreish you don’t even know it’s an advert.

theartsdesk received a New Year's gift last night when we were given a significant accolade from BBC Radio 5 Live. In Web 2009 with Helen and Olly, the station's podcasters and self-styled "internet obsessives" Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann recognised theartsdesk as one of the five "essential sites of 2009" in a series of awards to the "cream of weblebrity".