Glee

Series five, episode one
If you’re tuning in expecting a teary tribute to the late Cory Monteith, you may be surprised by tonight’s season five opener. After a mournful ‘Yesterday’ – in which Lea Michele’s Rachel nods to Monteith while just about clinging to the essence of what made the song great – there’s a celebratory feel about events as she starts to rebuild her ambitions and New Directions get the assignment they’ve been waiting for.

When the ever-resistible Mr Schue announces that the class should cover the Beatles ‘in new and exciting ways’, you’d be entitled to fear the worst. But sensibly, the treatments of ‘Help!’, ‘Drive My Car’, ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ et al stick tightly to the original arrangements, while the vocals are tidy and relatively free of Auto-Tune. It helps that Sue Sylvester is back too, running the school, smearing her predecessor and even ‘quoting Jesus’ (from the Gospel according to Sue): ‘The end justifies the means.’

Given the external pressures, it’s a triumphant return for an increasingly patchy series. There’s more of the Fab Four next week, before Monteith gets the full musical eulogy for episode three – an unbearable prospect in every sense.