WHEN I found out the new drama The Fall wasn’t, after all, the story of a chaotic rock band with almost 50 ex-members and one constant – incorrigible, irascible Mark E Smith – I was disappointed. But the feeling didn’t last, because this is a psychological thriller and a good one, maybe the best since The Shadow Line.

Like the ubiquitous single Get Lucky, Daft Punk’s new album is a distillation of pop’s better moments of the last four decades.

Our roundup of the latest releases

IT HAS been suggested that there’s something of the Gatsby about Baz Luhrmann, since both men are predisposed to throwing extravagantly spectacular parties, with just a hint of hollowness.

DO YOU like cars? Or do you prefer movies where bulging, baldy action heroes like Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel glower at each other like homoerotic new potatoes?

THERE are probably more foolhardy enterprises than interviewing the aggressively venomous rock drummer Ginger Baker for a documentary, but it’s hard to think of many.

I MEET the artist Hayley Tompkins in a Glasgow coffee shop during a brief sunny interlude in a week of rain.

ONE of the first characters to appear in Inferno is a spiky-haired, malevolent biker chick dressed in black leather.

IF AN aged, once-eminent author, close to the end, ekes out one almost-­certainly-last­ novel, and it’s of an indifferent standard, or worse, should it be ­published out of respect for his or her more glorious past?

A PUNCH cartoon, two dukes at a party, one whispering into the other’s ear: “Don’t you think it must be just terrible being an earl?”

OVER the years, Melvyn Bragg’s writing has attracted a degree of (jealous?) teasing, but the dissenting voices compete with a louder chorus of praise in which he is favourably compared with DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy.

WHO is afraid of Saoirse ­Ronan? In the bowels of a Glasgow hotel, she looks innocent enough, sitting demurely in the manner of a 1950s model, legs crossed at the ankle and chatting about how best to drain a body of blood.

HOW important are the voices of artists in the independence referendum?

THERE are nine of them. Nine Chelsea girls, or Chelsea ladies to be precise, down from Scotland, from Kelso, Keith, Castle Douglas, Dalgety Bay, North Berwick, East Lothian, from all over, and poised, secateurs in hand, to take Britain’s most prestigious gardening show by storm.

IT WAS some years since I’d been in an exam room.

DIANE Abbott MP, is a woman I have some trouble taking seriously since my retinas were scarred watching as she and Michael Portillo writhed together, OK sat, on the This Week sofa, and also that time she said private schools were bad before promptly sending her son to one.

AS WENDY Helliwell came downstairs on Wednesday morning, the name Jolie flashed on the TV screen. She caught the words “double mastectomy”.

‘CLICHES, cliches... I’m sick and tired of all that bloody rubbish, to be honest with you.” Is this a) Lord Sugar when confronted with another bunch of braggards spouting business-speak on The Apprentice? Or b) your correspondent on having to listen to yet more soundbites, headlines and clunky phrases passing for dia­logue in The Politician’s Husband? Both, actually. Let’s deal with The Apprentice first.

THERE’S more light but much less of an Exile On Main Street parody here than on much of the band’s recent work, as Bobby Gillespie submerges us in his wonderful world of psychedelic paranoia.

OUR critics review the rest of the week’s album releases