Hysterical

Sandford's passionate tale of one family's relentless fall into poverty and homelessness - directed by Loach with characteristic vigour - was a watershed in British TV drama. Only a few moments in television's history can match the emotional charge of Cathy Come Home's heartrending climax, in which Social Services officials separate a hysterical Cathy from her children. Hugely influential in its day - its broadcast gave a major boost to the launch of the homelessness charity Shelter a few days later.

In consequence of a number of stunning catastrophes Arthur Dent is surprised to find himself living in a hideously miserable cave on prehistoric earth. However, just as he thinks that things cannot possibly get any worse, they suddenly do. He discovers that the Galaxy is not only mind-bogglingly big and bewildering, but also that most of the things that happen in it are staggeringly unfair…

Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), a young socialite, meets Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a San Francisco bird shop. Brenner wants to purchase a pair of lovebirds for his sister's eleventh birthday, but the shop has none. He pretends to mistake Daniels for a salesperson, which infuriates her; she requests an explanation.

Calm was the last thing that Could We Survive a Mega-Tsunami? (BBC Two) was trying to create. Instead the objective of this imagined staging of a super wave hitting Europe and America appeared to be the creation of enough fear to have paranoid survivalists fleeing up the nearest mountain to barricade themselves in. What else was this Hollywood-style, CGI-heavy bad dream with hysterical voice-over and tribal wailing trying to achieve? Understanding for the real survivors of the real tsunamis that really killed 200,000 people and devastated the Indian Ocean region in 2004? Or the even more recently traumatised victims of this natural horror show in Japan? I hadn’t detected a world sympathy deficit following these events, and use of real footage of the carnage from those disasters mixed up with fantasy sequences seemed gratuitous.