BBC

It’s launch week. It’s January. So, no sharing the love and stress of such events with like-minded buddies in the office. Instead, it’s a weird dichotomy of a high-speed roller-coaster ride – but from the comfort of my front room/office.  

Our talented 50-plus We Are England team (as the Ronseal name alludes to) spans the whole of England, from Newcastle to Leeds, Birmingham to Norwich and London to Bristol. Lockdown working practices have been the unanticipated saviours of our schedule and sanity.  

Created and written by Chris Brandon, the new six-part series will see the return of James Nesbitt as the lead character DCI Tom Brannick. 

Nesbitt will be joined by Victoria Smurfit, who plays Olivia, an enigmatic widow who is at the heart of Brannick’s latest case, but looks may deceive, as Smurfit’s intentions aren’t as innocent as they seem.

At the end of the last series, the identity of legendary assassin Goliath was shockingly revealed to be Brannick.

Waterloo Road originally aired from 2006 to 2015 and was known for its entertaining and engaging human stories that tackled difficult and important issues. 

Angela Griffin will be returning as Kim Campbell, who is now the headteacher at Waterloo Road, Adam Thomas will return as Donte Charles and Katie Griffiths will return as Chlo Charles, both former students at the school. 

The series gained a new, young and diverse audience, adding to the loyal fanbase, when the boxset was added to BBC iPlayer in September 2019.

The landmark documentary will show minute by minute what happened to the dinosaurs when the asteroid hit Earth and led to their demise. 

There is plenty of evidence relating to when the asteroid hit the Earth at the end of Late Cretaceous period 66 million years ago, but there is no direct evidence that confirms how it killed the dinosaurs.

A new dig site of a prehistoric graveyard known as Tanis, hidden in the low hills of North Dakota, has fossilised creatures dating back to the end of the Late Cretaceous buried under a layer of rock.

It’s more of a trickle than a flood, but live sport is returning to free-to-air television. Women’s football, cricket’s new The Hundred competition and, most recently, Super League rugby have all signed deals that give terrestrial TV the right to show some live matches.

Super League rugby games will air on free-to-air TV for the first time in the competition’s history in 2022 after a two-year deal was agreed with Channel 4. Sky Sports will show the overwhelming majority of fixtures, while Channel 4 will show 10 games.

Lockdown left its mark on TV coverage of the arts: Sky Arts went free-to-air, while Channel 4 scored a zeitgeist hit with Grayson’s Art Club and the BBC gave us its Culture in Quarantine initiative.

It is staggering to think that, in the 1960s, one of Esther Rantzen’s first TV appearances in a trailblazing career was during a debate about whether a woman could ever read the news. “It took another 15 years before Angela Rippon read the BBC news in 1975, followed by Anna Ford on ITN in 1978,” she noted in her RTS London Christmas Lecture.

Now Dame Esther Rantzen registered a few TV firsts herself in the intervening 55 years. As she put it: “I was there when some of the glass ceilings were broken through. Indeed, some of the fragments are still stuck in my skull.”

In his stirring Steve Hewlett Memorial Lecture, “Integrity in television: 50 years through the lens”, award-winning journalist Peter Taylor offered a powerful defence of the BBC.

Before he began, Taylor paid tribute to Hewlett, a “former colleague and friend, who produced two of the films of which I am most proud: The Maze: Enemies Within and Remember Bloody Sunday. He was great to work with. Tough minded, sharp and meticulous.”