Waking the Dead - Season 6 (2006)

OK it's not quite as mad as the last one, but Deus Ex Machina does begin with a man sewing his own lips together, cut against the British Army in Sudan in the 1860s - Nicholas Blincoe is the writer (also 8 Minutes Idle). Alex Jennings, Polly Walker (Enchanted April, Rome), Graham Crowden (always nice to see him) and Adam James are involved in the shady disappearance of an ancient skull, and a club of oiks which turns out to be  breeding ground for future Intelligence operatives.

Jennings plays a professional 'truth getter' i.e. torturer of political prisoners, so he and Boyd have a merry conversation about ethics and for once Boyd can't rattle him.

The Fall. Damian Wayling. Two lovers are found mummified in a disused bank - 'Adam and Eve'. Goes back to bank collapses in 1992.

Peter Capaldi (Local Hero) and Stanley Townsend (primarily a stage actor, Happy Go Lucky) were the names I maddeningly couldn't recollect. With Terence Harvey, Nick Dunning, Oliver Ford Davies. The action moves to Dublin where amusingly Spence is usurped by Townsend as Boyd's No. 2. Catherine Walker is the journalist.

Sue Johnston's been fabulous from the word go.

Columbo: It's All in the Game (1993 Vincent McEveety)

Fallen-from-grace Faye Dunaway was already looking weird through plastic surgery. She and girlfriend Claudia Christian have bumped off serial adulterer Armando Pucci in quite an ingenious way, but it doesn't hold water for our doggedly persistent detective. Peter Falk wrote it and exec produced.

Dunaway's all over him, to try and distract him from the case, which is frankly embarrassing. And doesn't work - obviously.

Dunaway's career never really recovered after the disastrous Mommie Dearest in 1981. The famous post-Oscar photo by Terry O'Neill:

Taken March 29 1977 the morning after her win for Network