Last week, 'Charley Says' reminded us all just how scared sh*tless Britain was by the threat of nuclear war during the 1960s and 1970s - understandably perhaps, given the risk of destruction of the entire human race. Nevertheless, despite the release of Protect and Survive, not many people were optimistic about their chances come Armageddon.

In part, that's thanks to the likes of this week's Wednesday Play, The War Game, which was a genuine Wednesday Play from 1965. Written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins, this documentary-style production imagined what would happen if there was a limited nuclear strike against Britain. And it's not pretty, with the instant blinding of those who see the explosion, a firestorm caused by the heat wave, radiation sickness, the British Army burning corpses and the police shooting looters during food riots.

Interspersed throughout the play are interviews with a series of establishment figures in favour of nuclear weapons and even nuclear war that were based on genuine quotations, as well as interviews with a doctor, a psychiatrist and others, giving details of the effects of nuclear weapons on the human body and mind.

Cheery, huh?

Well, no. In fact, following its transmission on 6 August 1965 (the 20th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing), the BBC said that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting" and withdrew it, never to air it in full until 1985. But, hey, lucky people, you can watch it now! Remember - if you like it, buy it.

• All systems go for Dumb and Dumber To

• Alison Brie, Justin Chatwin and Colin Hanks to star in No Stranger Than Love

Trailers

• Full trailer for Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

UK TV

• BBC1 green lights: Kay Mellor's The Club
• Big Talk working on Mummy's Boys pilot
• David Baddiel developing new sitcom, Sit.com

US TV

• YouTube drama Blue added to Hulu
• ReelzChannel acquires: Showcase's King

• Selma Blair off Anger Management

New US TV show casting

• Liv Tyler to co-star in HBO's The Leftovers

• Alex Breckenridge and Whitney Able to star in Dark
• Ryan Reynolds drops out of Highlander

Trailers

• Trailer for Killing Season with Robert De Niro and John Travolta

• Wonder Woman gets a second title for the first time in 61 years

UK TV

• ITV green lights: new series of Birds of a Feather
• Jenna-Louise Coleman, Penelope Keith, Trevor Eve, Rebecca Front, James Fleet et al join BBC1's Death Comes To Pemberley
• Sunday ratings: The White Queen gets 5.33m viewers

• The first two minutes of season two of Copper
• Sunday cable ratings: True Blood returns with 4.5m viewers

New US TV shows

• Amazon green lights: pilot for Bosch
• Disney green lights: Girl Meets World series
• Teaser for Showtime's Masters of Sex

• John Hurt to co-star in FX's The Strain
• Emily Head to star in Bravo's Rita

• Someone won't return for The Avengers 2 [spoilers]

Film casting

• Krysten Ritter and Ryan Hansen return for Veronica Mars movie
• Ray Winstone joins The Gunman
• Agyness Deyn to star in Electricity
• John C Reilly joins Guardians of the Galaxy

Trailers

• Trailer for Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio et al
• Clip from Don Jon with Scarlett Johansson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tony Danza
• Trailer for Touchy Feely, with Rosemarie DeWitt and Ellen Page

UK TV

• ITV renews: DCI Banks
• Peter Morgan to write Christopher Jefferies drama for ITV [subscription required]
• Michael Jibson, Emily Beecham join BBC2's The Thirteenth Tale
• Diane Morgan join ITV's Cabbage and Pat
• Saturday ratings

US TV

• Thursday ratings: Hannibal hits series low

• Scott Foley to be a regular on Scandal, plus promotions on Grey's Anatomy
• Erin Cummings to guest on Unforgettable
• Jorge Garcia to guest on Hawaii Five-0
• A returning Burn Notice character [spoilers]

• Starz developing 50 Cent nightclub drama

• George Wendt to guest on Kirstie

First, the usual recommendations:

• Continuum (Showcase/SyFy)
  
• The Daily Show (Comedy Central)
• The Fall (BBC2/Netflix)
• Hannibal (NBC/Sky Living)

Still in the viewing queue: last night's Graceland and I'm toying with watching Channel 4's The Returned, even though I normally can't be arsed with zombie shows, even French zombie shows.

Here's a few thoughts on what I did watch this week, though :

• Continuum (Showcase/SyFy): After last week's improvement, yet more signs of recovery, with the various first-season story arcs starting to come back to life again at last, joining the new ones from this season. As well as some things that made precisely no sense, we did get a whole collection of great moments, mostly involving Carlos and Kiera. I think it's clear where a lot of this is going but there's enough surprises still coming that it still feels quite fresh and exciting.
• The Daily Show (Comedy Central): John Oliver's first week on the job and although he's obviously not as comfortable in the job as Jon Stewart – give him time – it's actually been a pretty good run so far. To a certain extent, he'll need to find his own voice as a host to differentiate himself from Stewart.
• The Fall (BBC2/Netflix): Ah! A notorious finale. Haven't had one of those in a while. Not so much a conclusion as a slight pause in the story. To be honest, the fact it's been renewed for a second series actually makes this a less impressive finale than it should have been, since it's quite an original thing to do (spoiler alert: let the criminal get away). Now it just looks like they were setting everything up oddly for a second series. Maybe they were. Nevertheless, despite this being the least impressive of all the episodes, it was probably the best British drama I've seen in a long time, so yay to a second series.
  
• Family Tree (HBO/BBC2): I think I'm going to give up after this one. It's giving me wry chuckles but that's about it. Well observed, well acted, even Nina Conti and Monkey are tolerable, but it's just not very funny.
• Game of Thrones (HBO/Sky Atlantic): So I finally made it through to the end of the third season. I think most of my comments from last week hold, particularly about the second season, although the nudity did drop off again in the third season, thankfully. I imagine that this is a show that's going to be best appreciated as one massive box set binge one day, because there's a lot going on that's frustratingly close to great but never actually gets there: you can see that everyone's eventual stories are going to end up being great, it's just we're in the middle of them as they head towards that greatness, and it's not going to be for another two to three seasons that we actually get to see it. Still, a lot to commend about it and I'm probably going to be glued to my set when the fourth season comes round. Perhaps Stephen Dillane and Patrick Malahide will meet again. PS The red wedding? What was all the fuss about?
• Hannibal (NBC/Sky Living): My hat's off to Bryan Fuller and co, as always, as the show hits its penultimate episode, revealing just how tightly written and architected this first season has been. What the finale will bring us is anyone's guess, but this has been one of the most consistently excellent first seasons of any show I've watched.
• Up The Women (BBC4): Already renewed for a second series, for which it will transfer over to BBC2, this studio comedy about suffragettes in 1910 features a great cast – Jessica Hynes, Rebecca Front, Adrian Scarborough – and some clever writing. Unfortunately, it doesn't feature any real jokes. Well, not that I found funny. There's probably a few people who'll laugh at a joke in which a man shows he knows less about a light bulb and how it works than a woman does, but they've presumably never seen comedy shows before and this will all be new to them. If, however, you have seen a comedy show before, then the most you can do is hope it does better and wish it well, since its heart is in the right place, at least.

And in movies:

Wreck-It Ralph
Bizarrely, it's Pixar does Tron. A villain in an 80s arcade game decides he wants more from life so goes exploring other video games, messing not only his own game up but those he encounters along the way. Weirdly, the first half is probably going to be unfathomable to anyone under the age of 30, with clever references to Pac Man, Streetfighter and any number of games that a child of the 80s would love and remember. The second half on the other hand is probably going to be unfathomable to anyone over the age of 40, since it's largely references to modern console games, particularly Super Mario Kart on the Wii. It's all very precise and very clever, and there's great vocal work from John C Reilly (Ralph), Alan Tudyk (the evil King Candy), Sarah Silverman (Ralph's new friend in the superbly imagined Sugar Rush) and Jane Lynch (a heroine from a first-person shooter) among others. But the fun-density isn't quite as high as it should be, with big chunks that just sort of amble by. Some of the sexual politics are a little debatable, too, but only a little. Enjoyable but not a true classic.

The Iceman
Given a choice of Michael Shannon movies to watch last night, I chose to watch The Iceman rather than Man Of Steel: I'm watching that tonight. I'm not sure Shannon could be better in the latter though, since he gives a spot-on performance as the real-life Iceman, a mafia hit-man who killed probably more than 100 people from the end of the 60s through to the 80s, somehow managing to keep the terrible truth from his family. Surprisingly, it's a film of good performances from the unexpected likes of Ray Liotta, Winona Ryder, Chris Evans (practically unrecognisable as another, rather hirsute killer) and, incredibly surprisingly, David Schwimmer from Friends. Perhaps a little slower and flatter than in needed to be, it's nevertheless a thoughtful insight into the mind of a sociopath who needs to kill people in order to preserve his marriage. Yes, that does sound weird.

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"What did you watch this week?" is your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV and films that they might be missing or should avoid - and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I've watched. Since we live in the fabulous world of Internet catch-up services like the iPlayer and Hulu, why not tell your fellow readers what you've seen so they can see the good stuff they might have missed?

• Christina Hendricks to star in Measure of a Man
• Haley Bennett joins The Equalizer
• Liam Hemsworth joins Cut Bank
• Adam Sandler to star in Hello Ghost remake
• Emma Watson to star in Queen of the Tearling adaptation
• Arnie confirmed as the Terminator in Terminator 5
• Tina Marjorino joins Veronica Mars

Trailers

• Trailer for Neill Blomkamp's Elysium with Matt Damon and Jodie Foster
• Trailer for Salinger

International TV

• Greek state TV back thanks to EBU
• Fox planning free Dutch channel

UK TV

• Wednesday ratings

• Wednesday ratings
• Wednesday cable ratings: Royal Pains and Necessary Roughness down

US TV casting

• Beth Riesgraf to guest on Perception

• Stellan Skarsgård to co-star in Cinemax's The Quarry
• Megan Hilty to co-star on NBC's Sean Saves The World
• Wes Bentley to star in HBO's Open
• Jason Alexander to guest on TV Land's Kirstie

12% of those polled believe the success of actor David Hasselhoff, star of Baywatch, is due at least in part to "dealings with the devil".

These days, Michael Moore is best known as a film-maker. Indeed, that's where he started with Roger and Me, a documentary in which he charted what happened in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, after General Motors closed its factories and moved to Mexico ('Roger' being Roger B Smith, the then-CEO of General Motors). Since then he's gone on to make Fahrenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine and Sicko and other notable polemics that have looked at everything from gun control to the US healthcare system.

16% of Perot voters believe "if dolphins were really smart, they could get out of those nets".

However, following the success of Roger & Me, Warner Bros contacted Moore about making a television series. After a long and circuitous route, Moore and his wife, TV producer Kathleen Glynn, came up with the idea of a humorous magazine show with a point of view. TV Nation was born.

NBC gave the go-ahead for a pilot for TV Nation in 1993 but soon discovered it didn't have room in the schedule for the show. But, strangely enough, the head of BBC2 heard about the pilot, saw it and offered to buy the show. This spurred NBC into adding the show to its summer line-up.

39% of Americans believe that guns are not "as dangerous as they say".

TV Nation was, as that initial idea and its pedigree suggested, a different kind of beast. Like 60 Minutes, the show had a number of correspondents – including Janeane Garofalo and Louis Theroux, who adopted a style of reporting much like Moore's and which he's been using ever since – reporting on issues while Moore (who himself did some stories) anchored the show and introduced each segment.

But the show had attitude. The kinds of stories chosen varied between the political to the consumer to the attitudinal. A correspondent might go undercover in shops to see if he could buy 'small-sized' condoms – and to see what the reaction was when he asked for them (laughter, frequently. And apparently you can buy them – they're called 'snug fit'). Or he might try to smuggle himself across the border… from Canada, only to discover that no one cared about illegal Canadian immigrants. Or perhaps an actor might move into a neighbourhood and behave in a 'serial killer' like way. On one occasion, the show hired a lobbyist for $5,000 in an effort to get Congress to declare a 'TV Nation Day' (it did).

And there was also Crackers, the 'Corporate-Crime-fighting chicken', who travelled the US highlighting incidents of corporate crime. Fondly remembered as well were the results of genuine opinion polls conducted for the show that highlighted both the silliness of opinion polls, as well as potentially worrying opinions among the US public.

12.5% of Americans that voted for Clinton believe that they will someday be told "just what Victoria's Secret is". 98% of Bush voters believe they will never know.

The BBC2 funding for the show ensured that not all investigations were American, however. As well as an investigation of the 'naughty schoolgirl spanking and canning' market for older men, the show featured segments on topics such as the TV licence, showing how Britons could be sent for prison for not paying the mandatory TV licence/tax.

37% of Americans agree that while they would hate being British, they wouldn't mind having a British accent.

NBC cancelled the show after the first season, but surprisingly Fox picked it up for a second season in 1995. And then cancelled it, despite getting more letters than they had ever had for any other show before. Nevertheless, by 1997, the BBC had raised all the money necessary for a third season. Unfortunately, without a US network willing to air it, the third season never happened, instead transforming into a Channel 4 show The Awful Truth, which carried on in much the same way.

You can't buy TV Nation on DVD, I'm afraid, but you can get The Awful Truth. Happily, you can watch clips from both below, including Louis Theroux's happy little chat with a member of the Ku Klux Klan as he tries to give them a PR make-over.

• Courteney Cox to make directorial debut with Hello I Must Be Going, Seann William Scott and Kate Walsh to star

Film casting

• Laura Dern joins Strings
• Eddie Redmayne to play Stephen Hawking in Theory of Everything

• Trailer for Keanu Reeves' Man of Tai Chi
• Another trailer for The Wolverine
• Trailer for In A World…
• Trailer for Diana with Naomi Watts and Naveen Andrews
• Trailer for 300: Rise Of An Empire with Lena Headey, Eva Green et al
• Trailer for Snowpiercer with Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton

French TV

• Canal+ to create a new channel for French, European and American TV
• TF1 cancels Jo, but the series may go on without it

• Up The Women moving to BBC2
• BBC2 greenlights: adaptation of MR James' The Tractate Middoth from Mark Gatiss, + other shows
• Tuesday ratings

US TV

• Portlandia gets two more seasons
• Tuesday ratings

New US TV show casting

• Lauren Lee Smith to be a regular in The Strain, plus other pilot casting

• Krysten Ritter joins Tim Burton's Big Eyes

• Trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Canadian TV

• CBC and BET to adapt The Book of Negroes

• Greek government shuts down ERT

UK TV

• Smack The Pony to return?
• Blinkbox to offer third season of Game of Thrones first
• Monday ratings: The Fall hits series high

US TV

• Direct TV renews: Rogue
• Sunday cable ratings
• Monday cable ratings: King & Maxwell starts okay, Major Crimes dips

• Alexander Ludwig and Linus Roache join Vikings
• Roger Howarth to recur on Californication
• Kunal Nayyar to guest on Sullivan & Son
• Shirley Jones to guest on Hot In Cleveland live episode

New US TV shows

• BET and CBC to adapt The Book of Negroes

New US TV show casting

• Sarah Jane Morris joins A&E's Occult
• Miguel Gomez joins FX's The Strain

Hey, but guess what. They need cash, apparently. They're trying to raise £6,000 on Kickstarter to fund the project, although they're already halfway there. Give them some cash and maybe they'll let you wear the helmet. Isn't that exciting?

• Ray Winstone and Aneurin Barnard join Sky1's Moonfleet
• Trailer for BBC2's Top of the Lake
• Sunday ratings: The Returned gets 1.5m

US TV

• Teasers for Eastbound & Down, Boardwalk Empire
• Sunday cable ratings

New US TV shows

• HBO green lights: half-hour comedy from Diallo Riddle and Bashir Salahuddin

New US TV show casting

• Christopher Eccleston et al join The Leftovers
• Tom Felton to co-star in TNT's Murder in the First
• Natalie Zea to recur on CBS's Under The Dome
• Jeremy Luke to co-star in TNT's Lost Angels

• Chris Lowell and Percy Daggs III join Veronica Mars
• Ken Howard and David Krumholtz join The Judge
• Christoph Waltz to star in True Crimes
• Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara to star in Don't Mess With Texas
• Hugh Bonneville joins Paddington Bear

Trailers

• Trailer for Not Another Happy Ending, with Karen Gillan
• Trailer for Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine with Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin et al
• Trailer for Frozen Ground with Nicolas Cage, John Cusack and Vanessa Hudgens
• Trailer for White House Down with Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx

UK TV

• A second series for Blandings
• Casting on Sky's Chris Addison sitcom Trying Again
• Cherie Lunghi and Barbara Flynn to star in ITV's Cabbage and Pat
• BBC developing Porters
• ITV2 renews: Plebs
• Saturday ratings

• Trailer for season two of The Newsroom
• Thursday ratings

New US TV shows

• HBO developing sci-fi drama The Spark, with Karl Gajdusek
• Showtime developing Heartland Trucking
• ABC green lights: The Black Box
• Trailer for HBO's Hello Ladies, with Stephen Merchant
• Behind the scenes trailer for Showtime's Masters of Sex
• Trailer for NBC's Siberia

• Recasting on Witches of East End

First, the usual recommendations:

• Continuum (Showcase/SyFy)
  
• The Daily Show (Comedy Central)
• The Fall (BBC2/Netflix)
• Hannibal (NBC/Sky Living)

These are all going to be on in either the UK or the US, perhaps even both, but I can't be sure which.

On Monday, I was somewhat incapacitated with food poisoning (oops), so spent the whole day in bed. Faced with the prospect of an entire day without brain stimulation, I decided to bite the bullet and try watching…

Game of Thrones
Yep, season 1 all in one go. And now I'm halfway through season 2. So no spoilers. On the whole, I'm liking it more than I did on my first attempted viewing a couple of years ago, but that might be because I made a stab at reading the first book to ease me in. I didn't love the first season, but I did enjoy a lot of the elements of it and the potential that it was building. I like the mix of mythic influences - the story's northern stories are more in keeping with Germanic and Scandinavian myth while the eastern stories are more in the style of Middle Eastern stories. I like the fact that a lot of it is about outsiders within a patriarchal system and how they learn to obtain power within that system. I like the fact it's essentially a good excuse to give overlooked British and Irish character actors (and Peter Dinklage) decent, regular, well paying jobs for a change.

Season 2 so far is feeling a bit of a filler season; the amounts of female nudity are ridiculous; and the increased magic quotient is unappealing. There's also no single Nedd Stark figure around which the second season revolves, which makes it feel a little rudderless. But both Patrick Malahide and Stephen Dillane have turned up, which can only be good news, and Charles Dance is marvellous.

Still in the viewing queue: Up The Women, BBC4's suffragette sitcom written by and starring Jessica Hynes, and last night's Graceland, USA's new cop show. My thoughts on those next week, I suspect.

Now, some thoughts on some of the regulars:

• Continuum (Showcase/SyFy): A near return to form this week, with sci-fi fun, some important revelations for both viewers and characters, and hints that all the standalone episodes we've been having actually had an arc in them (spoiler alert)that another corporation from the future is trying to acquire all its competitor companies and their technologies in the present, including Alec's. Still not up there with season 1 and we could do with Liber8 getting its act together, but it slightly restored my faith in the show.
• The Fall (BBC2/Netflix): Less about misogyny, more about Belfast this episode, as well as some expansion on the background of Gillian Anderson's character. The revelation from Archie Punjab was a little too deus ex machina (spoiler alert)she knew someone who went out with the serial killer at university, but I'm hoping they can pull back from that.
• Hannibal (NBC/Sky Living): Last week's saw Ellen Muth (Dead Like Me, another Bryan Fuller show) turn up as someone who thought she was dead, making for an interesting piece of deconstruction. As in previous weeks, the episode ended with an entirely throw-away but stunning moment of horror that'll stick with you. The idea of Lecter and his friend withholding information like that was also ghastly, but in an entirely different way. This week's episode was slightly let down by Eddie Izzard turning up again and was a little low-key, but was also disturbing and affecting in its own way. I'm wondering what's up with Gillian Anderson's character - are they ever going to do anything with her, or is that for later seasons?

And in movies:

The Hangover 3
Not an especially funny film, yet still better than the second. Weirdly, though, it didn't actually feel like they were trying to make a funny movie, more an action drama with the occasional joke. All the regular characters were back plus John Goodman, but unlike 2, this didn't rehash the plot of the first movie, instead sending the 'Wolf Pack' to go looking for gold (literally) because of naughty old Ken Jeong. Weirdly, it's clear they could have made a funny film if they'd wanted to, judging by the end titles.

"What did you watch this week?" is your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV and films that they might be missing or should avoid - and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I've watched. Since we live in the fabulous world of Internet catch-up services like the iPlayer and Hulu, why not tell your fellow readers what you've seen so they can see the good stuff they might have missed?

• Gillian Jacobs to star in Hot Tub Time Machine 2, Chevy Chase to return
• Melissa Leo joins The Ever After
• Jennifer Lawrence to star in Rules of Inheritance

• Final trailer for Man of Steel
• Trailer for Runner Runner with Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake
• Trailer for Eden

French TV

• Canal+ reviving Pharaoh

Canadian TV

• CTV acquires Marvel's Agents of SHIELD and The Goldbergs…
• …reveals fall line-up

US TV

• Showtime renews: Nurse Jackie
• HBO cancels: Eastbound & Down
• Teaser for season 3 of Necessary Roughness
• Wednesday's ratings

US TV casting

• LeAnn Rimes to guest on Anger Management

• CBS to adapt Taxi 22
• Trailer for Netflix's Orange Is The New Black

New US TV show casting

• Paige Davis to co-star in A&E's Whitey, Gordon Clapp to recur on TNT's Lost Angels

It's tempting, these days, just as the likes of Agents of SHIELD, Hannibal and Bates Motel are gracing our screens (or about to), to think that the idea of spinning off a TV series from a popular movie is a new phenomenon. But just as the likes of Dick Barton and Bernard Quatermass were moving from radio and the small screen to the big screen in the 40s and 50s, so, too, were popular movie characters making the transition to TV.

So after the jump, let's talk about Harry Lime aka The Third Man.