From Judi Dench’s very naughty tea with Kenneth Branagh to the Peep Show Bake Off special – including Olivia Colman! – here’s your definitive guide to the best holiday viewing. Bring it on

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He’ll soon be going back on the hunt for bent coppers – but not before a wild revenge tale of divorcees going rogue. The star talks feeling inferior to Meera Syal, his life in the US and why he’s thrilled to be typecast

While we embark on the inhumanly long wait for the new season of Line of Duty, which starts shooting in January, you’ll see Martin Compston – the show’s hero and true north – a number of times. Twice as you’ve never seen him before, and once, in Red Eye, in the form that you’ve come to know and love him: brisk and taciturn, brave and speedy, the man you’d trust to save the world while the dopes all around him can’t even see it needs saving.

But first, The Revenge Club, in which he is a revelation. The setting is a support group for divorcees, a ragtag gang united by nothing but the fact that they’ve been summarily dismissed by their spouses. “There’s no other reason for these characters to be in each other’s lives,” Compston says from his home in Las Vegas (more on that later – much more). “They’re all desperate and lonely and in dire need of companionship. They’re all, in their own ways, broken, which makes for this explosive mix.”

The reboot brought a parade of new and aged-up faces, multiple returns of Toadie and a violent siege at Harold’s. But in the end Ramsay Street faces death by freeway

Forty years ago, some plucky kids with broad accents rode their bikes around a quintessentially Australian cul-de-sac, lined with postwar houses that could have been any of ours. A catchy tune promised that, if we were there for one another, we could become good friends with the people next door. But now it’s over.

Neighbours has a habit of ending. After it was axed in 1985 by its first Australian broadcaster, Channel Seven, the network even destroyed the sets to make sure it was truly gone. We have, more than once, grieved the end of a community so tightknit that the school principal is also your estranged dad’s ex-wife’s former fake-son-in-law’s surrogate mother.

Howlingly funny comedy, jaw-dropping documentaries and astonishing drama … it’s been another fantastic year of TV. Our countdown of the very best kicks off here
• More on the best culture of 2025

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