Wolf Hall (BBC2) | iPlayer
The Eichmann Show (BBC2) | iPlayer
Cucumber (C4) | 4oD
Catastrophe (C4) | 4oD

What to say about Wolf Hall? Alex Jones, on The One Show, had a go. She interviewed the terrifically bright actor Claire Foy, who plays the snaky Ms Boleyn, and opened with the question: “It’s very hotly anticipated. Why do you think that is?”

Alex, last seen by these eyes murdering a live broadcast by using the word “brilliant” seven times in 49 seconds, was rewarded with a sweet smile which was hardly condescending at all. “Well, I think it’s probably because of the book.”

Indeed. Hilary Mantel’s all-conquering Booker-blocker – though, to my mind, still hardly a patch on her French Revolution novel A Place of Greater Safety – turned up on our BBC screens, fittingly enough, as that corporation still does this kind of stuff better than anyone else on the planet, to accountable praise and an unaccountable hoo-ha regarding codpieces.

“It is a sick book from a sick mind and it’s being promoted by a sick broadcasting corporation,” said Norman Tebbit of Mantel’s Thatcher short story, which he hadn’t read, but which caused such a fuss when it was posited last year as Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime (and no fuss at all when it was broadcast). Substitute, if you will, “sick” for Alex Jones’s favourite word, and you have a measure of this heftier Mantel creation, adapted with mesmerising deftness by Peter Straughan.

It is, admittedly, dark, in both lighting and tone. I’ll forgive both: there were dark nights back then, and candles weren’t cheap, and there was much beheading and filth and war and, well, gloop and stench. But surprising sweetness too, in lawyer Thomas Cromwell’s fractious home life and the laughters therein: and in the relationship between himself and the beleaguered Cardinal Wolsey. All of this is captured with tremendous brio, with a garlanding of lovely heavyweight actors – Foy, Jonathan Pryce (as Wolsey), Bernard Hill and, of course, Mark Rylance as Cromwell, gravelly and understated and cleverer than a tricky box of foxes.

My colleague and pal Phil Hogan once wrote a headline that brilliantly meshed a theatre critic’s enthusiastic praise with the last line from Hamlet: “The zest is Rylance.” And it really was – Mark Rylance simply is Thomas Cromwell, to the extent that some are worried that Mantel, currently on the third part of her trilogy, will find herself fogged by images of Rylance. (I do suspect she’s not that foggable.) But Cromwell’s tenacity, brains and ambition simply fill the screen, even if – perhaps especially if – he’s just lurking in a tiny dark corner. His exchange with Anne Boleyn, regarding Wolsey’s failure to secure a papal annulment for Henry VIII’s child-unblessed marriage to Catherine of Aragon – Joanne Whalley, later seen having to defend herself to a roomful of snickering God-botherers who have the power to chop off her head – is typical.

“One thing – ” pouts Anne to the low-born Cromwell – “one simple thing – we asked of the cardinal.” “Not so simple, ma’am.”

“Do you think I’m simple?”

“You may be. I hardly know you.”

Ouch and double-ouch, and so several gauntlets are already flung. It is a tale to which I will return: ultimately a tale of pragmatism (Cromwell) versus idealism (Thomas More, and that didn’t end too well). A very political tale, but one possessed of sublime watchability. Like The West Wing. But with much more blood, and corseted and codpieced intrigue, and squirrely villainry and double entendres and Fat King Hal and intellectual conundrums – so what, I ask of both you and Mr Tebbit, is not to love?

Who did more damage: Fat King Hal, with his new church, or Hitler? One for Melvyn Bragg, surely, but those of us with less philosophical brains were gifted the chance to watch another great damager in The Eichmann Show, a phenomenal retelling of the filming, in 1961, of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem.

This was crucial viewing, in the sense that it deserves to be rerun, often, for both sharp tacks and dimwits. Ostensibly the tale of a couple of gutsy Americans who fought to have that trial shown globally – it was, essentially, the world’s first planet-wide TV event, in the year in which that same planet awoke to the truth of the Holocaust – it darkened horribly when the true scratchy archive footage of the death camps, Eichmann’s legacy, was unfurled.

I was privileged enough to be flown a few weeks ago to Vilnius, where much of this was filmed, to talk to Martin Freeman and Anthony LaPaglia. In a quiet moment I found myself on the set of the “courtroom”, and sidled, unheeded, into the glass box where Herr Eichmann was scheduled to stand. And this was a film set. And 1,650 miles from Jerusalem, in frozen Lithuania. Still I felt the hairs rise on my scalp. Both those actors had by then seen the real footage from the camps, and quietly acknowledged to me that their roles had perforce to take second billing, 2,000th billing, to the archive footage.

I hadn’t seen it, until later in rough-cut in a Soho studio. Rice-paper skin on cartoon skeletons, but, of course, once this was a man. Add, as they did on Tuesday’s broadcast, Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, specifically the part where Zofia Kilanowicz starts quietly to sing, and it was unbearable, leaving me so bereft about the 20th century that I was temporarily unable to recall anything joyous or clever about it other than the film High Society, the music of Donald Fagen, the gleeful tang of Curly-Wurlies or Phil Hogan’s headline.

That 1961 production’s director Leo Hurwitz, played by LaPaglia, had become obsessed with finding a smidgen of guilt in Eichmann’s eyes. He failed, as did we. Adolf’s lip curled and twitched, but the eyes remained unreadable. Despite having battered through Hannah Arendt’s equally unreadable Eichmann in Jerusalem on the plane over, I am still in the dark as to how humans can perform such unconscionables.

Which was, quietly, the eventual point. I remain baffled, but I have now more information.

Cucumber was strong meat indeed. We are, most of us, used to and variously inured to sweary, sweaty post-watershed heterosexual filth-feasts, sometimes draped with the gossamer of High Drama or Comedy. Here, Russell T Davies, who 15 years ago gave us Queer As Folk, had men doing it to men, but with the twist of middle-aged gay men yearning, quietly, for the lost cucumber.

It was unapologetic from the start, lingering lovingly on denim manbottoms as jump cuts showed cucumbers thwacking into open palms. It also featured a glorious sequence with antihero Henry (Vincent Franklin) taking an overlong shower to some gay anthem while, unheeded, his iPhone stacked up with tales of imploding lives. This is terrific, and deeply funny, and dramatic, and very gay.

Catastrophe, a new something-or-other – romcom? Chaucerian cautionary tale? – was, disappointingly, terrific. I had wanted to be able to dismiss it with an easy snide “Catastrophe ’nuff said” or similar – actually I hope I’d never have written anything so nuff-naff – but co-writers/co-stars Sharon Horgan and the American Rob Delaney have created, with one random pregnancy, two delightful characters who bleed authenticity.