What Has Become of Us?: Channel 4, Sunday, December 18, 8pm. Professor Peter Hennessy provides a personal account of post-war history, seeking an identity for modern Britain. This episode considers the social and cultural developments of the Fifties and Sixties.

Black Christmas Shooting Stars: Channel 4, Monday, December 19, 7.50pm. This celebration of black culture opens Channel 4‘s Christmas season, which this year, in keeping with its multicultural remit, focuses on the experiences and ideas of black communities in Britain, the West Indies and the United States.

Open Space Look Back in Anger: BBC2, Tuesday, December 20, 7.30pm. Sheila McKecknie is retiring as director of Shelter, the campaign against homelessness. Here she attacks the Government for failing to respond to the needs of the young homeless and for a “narrow-minded obsession with home ownership”. She also reflects on her successes, such as reducing the use of unsuitable bed and breakfast accommodation and blocking plans by London hotels to hose down the homeless sleeping in doorways.

A Man for All Seasons: Sky Movies Gold, Wednesday, December 21, 8pm. This Oscar-winning film version of Robert Bolt’s play tells the story of Henry VIII’s split with his Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, over the king’s plans to divorce and re-marry. The Tudor drama traces the early years of the Church of England and the power struggle between monarch and political leader, which ended with Thomas More being beheaded at Tower Hill.

Witness The Morehouse Men: Channel 4, Thursday, December 22, 9pm. A documentary portrait of a college in the United States that has been dubbed the “black Harvard”, for motivating and educating black students. Alumni include Martin Luther King and Spike Lee. Founded in 1867 to educate the sons of freed slaves, it aims to provide the country’s first black president.

A Child’s Christmas in Wales: BBC2, Thursday, December 22, 12.25pm. A performance of Dylan Thomas’s tale of Christmas in a small Welsh town. The reading will be interspersed by archive footage of Wales in the grip of winter in 1947.

How the Angels Fell: Radio 3, Friday, December 23, 10.45pm. You’ve made them out of tinsel, you’ve dangled them from trees, and more worryingly, according to a Gallup poll, 32 per cent of Americans claim to have met one. Angels, mainstays of medieval artists, John Milton and pop lyricists, have had an up-and-down couple of millennia, and this programme explores their religious and historic significance.