TV / DVD

Olive Kitteridge is not a happy woman. In the first two minutes of this slow-paced, bleakly humorous HBO mini-series she is preparing to shoot herself in the glorious autumn woods of Maine, northeastern US. The series is based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Elizabeth Stout and directed by the acclaimed film maker Lisa Cholodenko.

Most of the rest of the series is a flashback to 25 years earlier, in the 1980s. Then she was a spiky middle-aged maths teacher in a small coastal town, living with her teenage son and her husband who she finds deeply irritating.

This eight-part series is billed as a thriller set against the backdrop of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The honourable woman of the title is Nessa Stein. She is the current head of the Stein Group, an organisation built by her arms-dealing Zionist father (“the sword of Israel”).

Every year the BBC commission a public figure to deliver a series of lectures to be broadcast on Radio 4. This year they have commissioned the British artist Grayson Perry, famous for his ornate pottery and his transvestism. To date he has given two lectures, with two more to follow.

"The number two" is overpowered by a phantom president who never appears on screen. The first few episodes show Meyer struggling to accommodate the interests of both Congress environmentalists and oil barons: a task that is, of course, full of spectacular blunders and a shambolic ending. Veep needs to be complimented for depicting the close ties between big business and the political establishment.

However, in this series Iannucci fails to fully explore any wider political context, concentrating mainly on the administration itself.

Boss, a US TV drama that has just premiered in Britain, focuses on the political manoeuverings of the Mayor of Chicago and his opponents. But it smacks more of The Sopranos than the West Wing, with a bit of King Lear thrown in. It is a portrait of the politician as a gangster and of the gangster as tragic hero.

In the process it raises interesting questions about the kind of future capitalism is creating, and the role of collective action in social change.

The plot follows Vancouver cop (or "Protector") Kiera Cameron, who is transported back in time from 2077 to the present when a group of rebels called Liber8 effect a daring escape from their imminent executions. She dedicates herself to preventing them from subverting the future, in the hope that she will discover a way to return to her time.

Axelbank worked at Goldwyn Pictures in New York. In 1917 he spotted a newspaper headline: Revolution in Russia! "I wish I could take motion picture there," he said. "We don't have any of our own from 1775."

The American revolutionary Max Eastman helped him make the film. An early supporter of the Bolsheviks, Eastman had travelled to Russia in the 1920s. He had close political relations with many of the leaders of the Soviet regime and especially with Leon Trotsky.

Today Ken Loach is an internationally feted filmmaker. But he was also once a prophet in his own country. Working with a generation of radicals, he excelled at what became known as the drama-documentary - a TV genre that was socially engaged, aesthetically experimental and politically influential. It made working class people the subject of public service broadcasting. This essential collection has many of the key works which now deserve the widest rescreening for their enduring relevance and artistic courage.

In 1964 Granada TV took the Jesuit maxim "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man" as inspiration for a series which documented the lives of 14 seven year olds every seven years. Now they are 56.

When it was first broadcast, Seven Up! shocked many with its emphasis on class - but that is what made it such compelling viewing. For me, this first programme remains the most powerful - at the time, I had been teaching seven year olds in an east London primary school.

In his will the deceased has left the flat to his "former flatmates". Like my own brother he was dead for two weeks before he was found, so the flat needs some cleaning up. We see a group photo which shows the seven main characters as they were when they first moved in.

Jack wants to run a sort of island of egalitarianism where people do not have exclusive relationships - but he imposes his own rules, such as no one being allowed to sleep with anyone else for more than three nights.