Paramount+

President Trump has a very small willy. His boyfriend is Satan. He’s a con man who will sue you for billions on the flimsiest of pretexts but will probably settle for a few hundred million. If this is your idea of cutting-edge satire then you are going to love the new season of South Park, which includes a number of scenes of Trump stripping off in his White House bedroom and trying to interest the devil in his minuscule appendage. But if I were Paramount+ and I’d just signed a $1.5 billion deal for the exclusive five-year rights to South Park, I think I’d be feeling a bit shortchanged by the première of the show’s 27th season. Sure, you could argue that South Park was always this way: the first episode (in 1997) was, after all, titled ‘Cartman Gets An Anal Probe’.

I’m about to give away the opening scene of the latest gangsters-are-cool drama MobLand. Don’t worry. It won’t spoil anything. By the end of this review you won’t want to watch even a moment of this dog’s breakfast of an atrocity of charmless, witless, misbegotten, amoral tripe anyway. So we’re in a basement with Tom Hardy, playing his usual amiably ruthless hard-man character. This time he’s called Harry Da Souza and he’s the chief fixer for a London-based Irish crime family called the Harrigans. On this occasion, Da Souza is mediating between two lower-tier rival gangs, whom he has orders to make apologise to one another. After much tense negotiation, the gang leaders agree to shake hands but refuse to apologise.

Remember the groans of dismay, possibly including your own, which greeted John Cleese’s announcement in February that he was reviving Fawlty Towers? Happily, there appears to be much more goodwill behind the return of Frasier – the bad news being that, judging from the first three episodes, it might well need it. Kelsey Grammer’s entrance – 39 years after Frasier Crane showed up in Cheers – received a huge audience ovation. All references, however straightforward, to his earlier incarnations got a guaranteed laugh. Nonetheless, for those of us desperately hoping the new series won’t be a letdown, the result so far has required an increasingly effortful keeping of the faith.

It’s hard to imagine in the wake of GoodFellas, The Sopranos and Gomorrah but there was a time, not so long ago, when the very existence of the Mafia was widely dismissed as an urban myth. What changed was Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestselling novel The Godfather, which sold nine million copies in two years. You might assume, not unreasonably, that the 1972 movie version – now acknowledged as one of the greatest films of all time – was one of the most obvious commissions in Hollywood history. But it was dogged by so much controversy and plagued by so many disasters that it was very nearly stillborn.