Downton's back for a second series... and this time it's war. Veronica Lee gets the Abbey habit

Christmas TV: Straight out of the top drawer

For half a century I have been hooked on diaries – my own and other people's. I began to keep a journal in 1959. I wrote my first entry on my first night at boarding school, by torchlight, underneath the blankets. My inspiration was the diary of Samuel Pepys. I had been given a copy, "suitably edited", for my 11th birthday.

The Tory scheme to roll back the state; those who know their station; the artist formerly known as the greatest thing since sliced bread; and a one-string pony

Poignant, sweet and very funny. A sports movie that's pitch perfect

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, the creators of 'The League of Gentlemen', have conjured up another bizarre bunch of misfits for 'Psychoville'. But, as they tell Gerard Gilbert, their new horror comedy's inspirations go beyond Royston Vasey

A new play satirising feminism has enraged Germaine Greer, on whose experience it is loosely based

That banshee wail you hear when the wind is in the northeast is the sound of the biter bit – Germaine Greer is very, very angry at the author of this play about a sixty-ish feminist scribbler (played by Eileen Atkins). Its action is inspired by the time Greer was, briefly, held hostage by a devotee. And that sound you hear from the Vaudeville is the audience roaring at the best Ayckbourn play Alan Ayckbourn never wrote. Joanna Murray-Smith has expanded the original incident into a chorus of demands for approval, apologies, explanations, relief, compensation, and closure. No one, it seems, can be satisfied, but, at the end, remarkably, all are happy, rolling in love, money, and taramasalata.

Bonnets and bustles were not in short supply in Cranford, but the BBC costume drama also addressed the dawning of a modern age, when railways intruded on rural life and Britain was on the brink of social upheaval.

Cranford, BBC1; This is Civilisation, Channel 4

Cranford, BBC1; Blair Years, BBC1

Elvis may have left the building but nobody ever expected him to run away and join the circus. But it won't be long before fans of legendary show Cirque du Soleil find themselves all shook up at the sight of the King growling "I ain't nothin' but a hound dog" while swinging from a trapeze.

"THE MILLION-copy bestseller", yells the jacket on the latest reprint of Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Vintage, pounds 5.99). A trifle previous, perhaps, since the latest figures showed the ubiquitous commuter's companion on sales of 995,000. At any rate, the Louis de Bernieres blockbuster has helped to fuel some smug punditry about the upwardly-mobile drift of the book charts. More will follow in the wake of the late Laureate's Whitbread victory this week, as Ted Hughes has lately outsold the likes of Terry Pratchett and Maeve Binchy. (Then again, Birthday Letters on its current form might well walk away with the Eurovision Song Contest, or even the Cheltenham Gold Cup.)

Some big hitters were over from the States this year. We went from the British premiere of Lakeboat, a riveting early David Mamet at the Lyric, Hammersmith, to the British premiere of a middle-aged David Mamet in Patrick Marber's taut production of The Old Neighborhood. In it, Colin Stinton was superb as the man in a mid-life crisis, leaving his wife and dropping in on his indignant sister, played with hilarious ferocity by Zoe Wanamaker. The National discovered an early Tennessee Williams, Not About Nightingales, written in the 1930s when he was still in his twenties. Trevor Nunn's powerfully atmospheric staging demonstrated his Dickensian eye for contrasts, aided by breathtaking designs of a savage prison by Richard Hoover. The only disappointment was the latest Edward Albee at the Almeida, The Play About The Baby, a sour, puzzling reprise of themes he has explored since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?