Strike (BBC1) | iPlayer
Electric Dreams (C4) | channel4.com
Doc Martin (ITV) | itv.com
Transparent (Amazon) | amazon.co.uk
Bad Move (ITV) | itv.com
W1A (BBC2) | iPlayer

Was there a little score-settling going on in The Silkworm, the concluding episode of which aired last Sunday to round off the sadly too-short Strike series? Certainly it was heavy on inside-track knowledge, gossip and bitchiness from the land of publishing, a world in which the author here nom-de-plumed as “Robert Galbraith” has long service. And thus one line fairly leapt out as Strike, the languid, limping Tom Burke, reached shaggily for yet another fag at a jazzy rooftop book launch.

“They moan about declining book sales, but everyone I’ve seen so far in publishing either has a drink in their hand or can only meet for lunch.” Um… I’m sure that’s true somewhere in publishing, but perhaps especially true in the case of your just happening to be JK Rowling. I seem to recall Rowling was livid when her Galbraith identity was leaked, even though the books had already garnered high praise from the likes of Val McDermid; she’d wanted to be judged blind on thriller merit. Yet without her “outing”, it’s far from certain the BBC would have picked up on the filmability of the books and we would have been denied Cormoran Strike, which would have been a huge shame.

The plots have admittedly been overly complex and have surely disappointed the Potterati kidults, frantically combing the opener looking for Hogwartia (“so… so… the actress who plays Robin has exactly the same surname, though not exactly cos it’s spelt wrongly, as Hermione! And, and, that’s it!), but they’ll just have to be damnably disappointed. What has been discovered is an undoubted chemistry between Strike, with his sweet sudden smile hinting of past damage, and Robin, with her ingenious whip-smarts and her frantically dull and needy fiance. It’s a lucky chemistry that can’t even be written: the on-screen partnership is subtle and unique and to be relished and cherished. They reunite next year, grand news for all.

Holliday Grainger, that not-Hermione, flexed her acting muscles the same night by portraying, with equal distinction, a wildly different beast, a telepathic “teep” in the opener of Electric Dreams. This series, C4’s ambitious reworking of the short stories of Philip K Dick, is bound to suffer from comparisons to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, shanghaied two years back by the deep-pocketed Netflix. In almost all ways the comparisons will be unfair.

Brooker can update almost until the moment of transmission, taking into account every techno breakthrough, each new social media phenomenon, selfies and snowflakes and trolls and the rest, to, essentially, lube up the present, through a glass darkly. Dick died in 1982.

This one of his, The Hood Maker, was written in 1955, smack in the hangover of McCarthyism, and much of the sense of chill paranoia remained, given fresh impetus by current twitches over eavesdropping by our internet giants. Though how much right we have to privacy, when half the nation seems to want to rush to the net blabbing its every secret thought in colonic detail, is quite another question. But it’s hard to be cutting edge in science fiction when some your source material is more than half a century old; on reflection, C4 and its adapters, aided by some starry casting, have made a relatively magnificent fist of it. Give this series a little time and care: next Sunday’s, The Commuter, featuring Timothy Spall, is simultaneously standout sweet and harrowing. And Philip Kindred Dick remains rightly feted as a visionary to rival Wells and Orwell.

Two years Doc Martin’s been off our screens and I find, somewhat head-scratchingly, that I’ve somewhat missed it. A rather welcome fainting lady vicar came to town, and failed to marry dunderhead Joe, and Al’s fat dad poisoned everyone, and thus all was back to normal among the usual yahoos and googans of Portwenn.

At heart, despite the clotted-cream fantasies, this still revolves around the Doc and the fact that the problem of living in any paradise, anywhere, will always, surely, simply be people and relationships. At one point, poor Louisa asked her husband, famously filter-free to the point I’m always staggered he passed any GMC screenings, of their son, James Henry: “Do you think he likes me?” Answers the now-peerless Martin Clunes: “Who knows?” A tragedy stuck inside a comedy, as so many fine British comedies have ever been at heart.

The enjoyment derived from Transparent, whose new season on Amazon centres on a family trip to Israel, will almost wholly depend on your tolerance for large and fast-talking Jewish families with a transgender father. Amid some sterling Jewish humour, some sterling matzo balls and some sex – much sex in fact, via all the siblings – there are immensely shrewd insights, especially on the nature of secrets, which underpin so much of this. “[In large families] you tell a lie just to get some privacy. Secrets are kind of a perfect stand-in for boundaries.” I’m coming shamefully late to this, but already it haunts: that mesmeric LA sunshine sprawling its fingers over such different bodies, such different heartaches. It’s one of the most tremendously kind, human works to have come out of America for, possibly, decades. Utterly hooked.

I wonder what led two rather fine R4 hosts, Jack Dee and Miles Jupp, who steer I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and The News Quiz with panache and, I had thought, a true compass for comedy, to the sub-funny Bad Move? Naked pocket-stuffing greed perhaps? Dee, who co-wrote the thing, downsizes to the country and finds, rather than a rural idyll, recalcitrant locals and dodgy broadband, ho ho. Compared to Rob Beckett’s Static last week it’s pant-wettingly hilarious. Yet so, comparatively, are rectal polyps.

And so it was a genuine delight to hear, once more, the strains of the Animal Magic theme as W1A returned for a third series. One of the joys of watch-again is that, in addition to the more garish tropes to which we’re now used – the folding bikes, Monica Dolan’s perpetual Welsh whining, Jessica Hynes’s PR gorgon – one can find, in almost every 30 seconds, unlooked-for subtleties. David Westhead as Neil Reid, the one-man Greek chorus whose muttered “bollocks” says, in sadly splendid isolation, what we’re all thinking, and the more hidden verbal tics from deadpan narrator David Tennant: “the department for culture, media and also for some reason sport”… “assistant of some sort Will Humphries”.

Incidentally, did you notice Dolan in Strike, playing the wrongly jailed wife? True skills, to turn from blistering darkness to high comedy over two nights. W1A continues to draw flak, roundly undeserved: too BBC-smug, too London, too hugging of itself, too versed in PR knowingness, too not-Brexit. I revere it as a brave commission, and a gleeful and celebratory use of most of the best comedy actors and improvisers of the last decade, surely a golden age, and long may it continue: at least until a massive backdrop of caustic creator John Morton appears on one of the walls, at which point the BBC can officially be proved to have eaten itself.