So, this is exciting. No sooner has Dominic West finished his work on the HBO cops-and-drugs-drama The Wire than he turns up as . . . Oliver Cromwell. I don't think of Cromwell often - though my father, a fan, owned an engraving of him which, at one time, used to hang above our breakfast table - but when I do, I picture him as stout and constipated-looking rather than [...]

As BBC documentaries go, World War II: Behind Closed Doors is rather significant. Not only is it the last series that will be written and directed by Laurence Rees, the BBC's creative head of history (Rees, who brought us such magnificent films as The Nazis: a Warning from History and Auschwitz, is leaving the corporation to devote himself to writing), it also signals the climax of the inexorable march within [...]

To all his other talents, the TV screenwriter extraordinaire Andrew Davies should now add: a Nostradamus-like ability to read the future. How else to explain his decision to follow up his peerless 2005 adaptation of Dickens's Bleak House with one of Little Dorrit (Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8pm)?

Of all the Dickens fans I've met in my life - more than a few, including my father, who named my sister [...]

The team behind Prescott: the Class System and Me (27 October and 3 November, 9pm) must have been gleeful when he agreed to take part; the cameras would begin rolling and hilarity, as they say in the movie-trailer business, would surely ensue. But how, I wonder, was the idea presented to the former deputy prime minister?

When I interviewed John Prescott last May he spoke of the film rather [...]

I once saw a picture of a Jersey Royal potato and a picture of Queen Victoria placed deliberately next to each other in a joke spot-the-difference competition. I forget where this gag appeared. I thought it might have been in Bert Fegg's Nasty Book for Boys and Girls, which Terry Jones and Michael Palin published in 1974, and which I used to read at least twice a year until I [...]

In hard times, people watch more television and they don't go on holiday, which means, in theory, that Stephen Fry's new series (Sundays, 9pm) will get nice ratings. Around Britain, people will sit in front of it, eating their Domino's pizzas and drinking their Lidl cava, and dream of what they are missing now that Virgin flights to New York and beyond no longer seem the bargain they were five [...]

Is there enough warmth on television? Craig Cash, who has co-written Sunshine (Tuesdays, 9pm), a new comedy-drama, thinks not. He would like to see more "warmth" and to experience fewer "cringes". So far as cringes go, all I can say is: he should probably avoid watching Alan Yentob's new series, The Story of the Guitar. But when it comes to warmth, I think he is wrong: the tog rating of [...]

When John Adams (Saturdays, 5.30pm) was first screened in America in March this year, there was some controversy over casting. Critics were agreed about Laura Linney, who plays Abigail, Adams's clever and collected wife: what an elegant performance, they said, heaving a collective sigh of admiration. But of Paul Giamatti, who plays Adams himself, they were less adoring. Much less.

They complained about his Mr Potato Head features, and worried [...]

What a face. No, not the Mona Lisa; I mean Robert Hughes. In old age, and having recovered from a near-fatal car accident, he looks more than ever like a Roman emperor, the swollen, bad-tempered kind who eats larks while simultaneously despatching orders for the murder of his enemies.

Towards the end of Mona Lisa Curse (21 September, 6.30pm), his magnificent polemical film about the art world and money, there [...]

Who, in the age of Big Brother, will stick with a fly-on-the-wall show about a family, the Hugheses of Kent, who agreed to be filmed 24 hours a day for nearly four months? Not many people, I bet. In 1974, when Paul Watson first made a documentary called The Family, we were all such innocents (and if I sound longing here, that's because I am). In those days, the sight [...]