To think the unthinkable, are we now getting towards the thin end of The Thick of It? The show remains unchallenged as the most bilious, urgent comedy on television. No argument there. It coruscates, it eviscerates – even a thin Thick of It does all those aggressive things to the body politic that satire should. But is there now the merest hint, just the faintest smidgin, of weariness, of heaving itself once more into the ring to land a few more blows on the clapped-out mob currently downing dregs of Pinot Grigio in the Last Chance Saloon?

It's over-egging it a bit to equate Krautrock with the entire rebirth of Germany. It's also slightly jarring to entitle the film Krautrock when its narrator then blames the World War Two-obsessed British music press for inventing such a disparaging term (cue supplementary evidence of Spike Milligan and John Cleese pretending to be Nazis.)

You can only assume they decided to confront the, er, generously proportioned mammal in the room. ITV launches a new police procedural starring the star of an old police procedural. Said star is a sizeable Scot with an old Toby jug of a face and, oh sod it, let’s just admit we’ve cast him because of the baggage. Yes, Cracker is back. OK, not Cracker, nor even Fitz, but a lived-in Glaswegian high-rise of a man who cracks murder cases on primetime, pausing only for the commercial breaks. It’s almost as if the young witness already knows all about Robbie Coltrane. “I’ve seen you before,” she says in the incident room. “Yeah?” he drawls. “I’ve been in the papers a few times.”

Would-be axe murderers of the BBC often propose to lop off (among other things) TV channels Three and Four, but Four’s music coverage is vastly better value for viewers’ money than the executive pension fund. Synth Britannia stuck firmly to Four’s “Britannia” formula, being a bunch of talking heads and clumps of archive footage interwoven with synth-pop classics from the late Seventies and early Eighties. But that’s OK as long as the raw material is strong, and this saga of post-punk, pre-New Romantic gadget-pop was often fascinating and sometimes even thought-provoking.

Hung is about a teacher with an enormous penis who becomes a gigolo, which might sound like prime Judd Apatow real estate, but is a surprisingly tender foray into the male and female sexual psyches.  Part two of HBO’s current male midlife crisis fixation is a completely different kettle of fish-out-of-water to Eastbound & Down – quirkier and less boisterous – and its pedigree (written by the creators of The Riches and shot by the director of Sideways) tells you a lot of what you need to know.

Is John Prescott’s post-political TV career a form of atonement, a retirement gift to his lovely wife Pauline and a chance for her to share centre-stage in place of the diary secretary? Whatever the reason, Pauline Prescott has taken to the limelight like an MP to expenses, benignly batting her mascara-crusted eyelashes as the couple take another of their Jag-chauffeured tours, a faintly ludicrous Old Labour twist on King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visiting East End Blitz victims.

In Superman's DC Comics universe, Bizarro World is a cube-shaped planet where everything on earth is echoed in back-to-front form. A smidgen of Bizarro thinking has surely infiltrated the bewildering environment of Fringe, where a special team of FBI agents struggle with incredible paranormal phenomena, impossible inversions of the natural order, and above all the concept of parallel universes, currently the hot topic at the start of series two.

The American remake of Life on Mars was judged a flop by its jumpy network, ABC, and scratched after just one season – which gave the UK premiere less the anticipation of a launch party and more the slightly shameful miasma of a hangover. And given that British audiences are well acquainted with the show’s audacious premise (that of a time-travelling cop in case anyone really has been on Mars) the foremost interest was always going to be ‘let’s see what kind of a hash the yanks have made of this one?’. Well, bad luck, this wasn't any kind of hash. It was great fun.