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.

There’s been reasonable diversity in the ballet shown on the BBC in recent years – from full-length broadcasts of Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty and The Red Shoes to the compelling 2011 fly-on-the-wall The Agony and the Ecstasy. That’s why it was something of a disappointment to find this week’s five-hour ballet season, which finished last night, pushing a rather blandly uniform story about Tchaikovsky, Darcey Bussell and Margot Fonteyn.

Back in the days before you could bash together an album on a phone, recording used to involve a group of musicians playing together in the same room. Finding the perfect studio ambience and acoustic was 90 per cent of the battle, and many a veteran musician will tell you that the studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama were the greatest of them all.

Hitherto, it has been routine for the average citizen to observe that while they could understand the causes of World War Two, getting a grip on why the world went to war in 1914 has been like trying to learn Mandarin while blindfolded and riding a bicycle. 37 Days, an account of the fateful few weeks leading up to the outbreak of war, has ambitions to change all that.

A series about the bizarre shenanigans of a family of ludicrous aristocrats would seem an unlikely hit for 21st-century Sunday night telly. It worked for ITV’s Downton Abbey, though, and while that’s off air, BBC One is glueing over five million to the settee with Blandings, its adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s tales of the dotty Lord Emsworth, and his prize sow, the Empress.

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.

Hassan Ismail Konyi is not the first young man to see football as a meal ticket. The twist is that he has rather more dependents riding on his dream that most. Hassan has 26 sisters and 35 brothers. He comes from South Sudan, the youngest country on earth and one of the more benighted. But a young man can dream, and his dreams are given fuel by his national coach.

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.

Is Brutalism brutal? Pugnacious? Uncouth? The name was coined by English academic and architecture writer Reynor Banham – more on him in a moment – as a play on the French béton brut (literally raw concrete) and the English “brute”, and hence was probably doomed from the start. Who, after all, can love an architectural style that sounds like it’s got all the grace of a troglodyte doing a plié before punching you in the face?