Location, location, location... a tangible sense of place and local identity can make or break a TV drama, and Under Salt Marsh exploits this to the full. It’s a haunting murder mystery, triggered by the discovery of the body of eight-year-schoolboy Cefin in a drainage ditch near the small town of Morfa Halen (that’s Welsh for “salt marsh”).

Evil capitalists are in the cross-hairs of this six-part thriller, conceived and mostly written by Sotiris Nikias. Possibly not the most original of villains, but they serve well enough as the basis for a story which takes a dive into the unscrupulous underbelly of London’s Square Mile and then spreads its tentacles around a cluster of assorted reprobates and untrustworthy characters.

The pitch for this movie might have been “Heat meets Miami Vice”, and it’s to the credit of writer/director Joe Carnahan that the finished result can stand toe to toe wi

An opening sequence set in the Andalusian city of Ronda, with its spectacular bridge across the El Tajo gorge, seems to be setting us up for a torrid adventure in semi-tropical heat. Especially after a desperate-looking character finds himself alone in Ronda’s empty bullring, before a solitary bull comes thundering out of its enclosure and gores him to death.

As one of the characters tells us: “There are two sides to every story… someone is always lying.” This telly-isation of Alice Feeney’s source novel, created by a quartet of screenwriters and directed by William Oldroyd and Anja Marquardt, picks up that idea and runs with it energetically. It pitches us into a vision of an American rural south which is plagued with deceit, guilt, simmering resentment and murderous intent dating back decades.

Reviews of The Hunting Wives have been taking the line of “it’s complete trash but I love it!”, which seems a perfectly reasonable response. It’s an everyday story of deceit, murder, weird sex and all kinds of corruption, set deep in the heart of Texas where they have some very strict ideas about guns and religion, especially the entirely taboo topic of abortion.

If any readers can still remember 2024’s first iteration of Red Eye, they will have an approximate idea of the kind of things they can expect from this second instalment, in short, fast-food drama tarted up with a bit of political skulduggery. Screenwriter Peter A Dowling has cunningly identified a niche in the market for aviation-centric thrillers, though where last year’s model was set almost entirely on board an aircraft en route to Beijing, this one is mostly locked inside the American Embassy in London.

Time flies. It’s 10 years since the first iteration of The Night Manager landed on BBC One (shortly before its star Tom Hiddleston had a fling with Taylor Swift, trivia fans). John le Carré, author of the Night Manager novel, died in 2020. He was apparently pleased with the first series, as was his son – and custodian of his father’s estate – Simon, which helped to inspire screenwriter David Farr to create this follow-up.

Analysts tell us that the UK’s top-rated TV show this Christmas was the King’s speech, with the Strictly Christmas special coming in a mere third. If this means anything at all, perhaps it’s just indicative of the bafflingly-expanding TV universe where it’s becoming impossible to keep tabs on everything that’s out there on a seemingly countless number of channels (and who on earth decided that “U&Drama” was a name to titillate the punters?). Even newspaper TV critics can’t seem to agree on what’s worth reviewing.

Whether there really was a poisonous professional rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri, composer to the Imperial court in Vienna, seems less than likely, but the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, on both stage and screen, has convinced the world otherwise. In Shaffer’s view, we see a Salieri consumed with envy and jealous rage at the effortless brilliance of Mozart, who seemingly had access to a continual stream of divinely-inspired inspiration.