It was several minutes into The National Anthem, Charlie Brooker's latest dramatic output on Channel 4 after his excellent 2008 mini-series Dead Set, a zombie-laden satire about reality television, before I laughed. I say that not as a criticism – far from from it – but as a huge compliment. For Brooker neatly confounded our expectations by making the opening scenes (shown as part of the Black Mirror season) appear as if they were part of a serious political thriller.

Before the internet and the Kindle were invented, generations of Americans saw their lives refracted through the pages of Life magazine. In particular, through its photography, since writers at Life were largely relegated to supplying glorified picture captions. They were also allowed to carry the photographers' equipment.

Those of a certain age have certain memories (very certain) of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, wife of the Bionic Man and not exactly unbionic herself, especially in that poster of her in the red one-piece with Seventies enormohair and fluorescent American Dream gnashers. There were a couple of others in Charlie’s Angels. One forgets their names, and indeed faces. (Feel free, scholars of the era, to write in on this.) It was revolutionary at the time: girls had been high-heeling men in the schnoz since The Avengers, but only one lady at a time.

It’s not long until we’re told, “There is enough money in the world to make everyone in the world a millionaire.” And if everyone was? Utopia and freedom might not be inevitable. Inexorable price rises would restore some sort of balance. Or a crash might follow. But as this extraordinary look into what’s been inspired by the American money motivators who’ve washed up on our shores showed: logic, be damned.

The archaeological documentary is becoming the obligatory format for tackling legendary tales of the British at war. Someone seems to recreate the Dam Busters raid every six months, the wrecks of battleships HMS Hood and the Bismarck have been tracked down in the ocean depths, and Time Team have excavated various subterranean artefacts from the Western Front.

The life-swap doc comes in sundry guises. Emissaries of simpler cultures visit our broiling cities to gawp at streets swimming in fresh spew and rivers of piss every Saturday night. Alternatively our lot pop off to places where people shit in holes and praise the Lord. Whichever way the story gets sliced, it’s always about the same thing: holding up a mirror to ourselves and not tending to like the view. Here’s what we look like when we stand next to this or that person with whom we wouldn’t change places for anything.

It’s a song which hangs in the air like pollen or reefer smoke, before gradually rising like a never-to-be-answered prayer. It began life as a lullaby but grew up to be a protest song, a scream of existential angst and even a purred invitation to sex. It’s a song like no other song, in that it has been covered more than any other song (its nearest competitors being “My Way” and “Yesterday”), and it was written by three Jewish immigrants before eventually being adopted by African-Americans as their own.

To start a new sitcom with 18 seconds of unbroken silence after the opening music has faded is a brave move. Such minimalism is not to everyone's taste and some viewers may switch off there and then, but others will recognise it as the calling card of minimalist comedy, which is unafraid of silence or indeed inaction.

There were those who laughed and those who spat outrage when Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs, said in a press interview that he was simply “doing God’s work”. Although Blankfein did have the insight to add that if he slit his wrists everyone would cheer, post-crash we would much rather our rich bankers expressed their religiosity by donning hairshirts and crawling on knees through broken glass - or at the very least stopped rewarding themselves so generously for the mess they got us in.

I had misgivings before watching Britain's Greatest Codebreaker last night on Channel 4: the advertised mix of drama and documentary tends to send a signal that neither half is sufficiently well done. And within a minute, it was clear that this was such a chimera: over-dramatic voiceovers for the documentary part, Ed Stoppard acting to the back row in the drama part.