While I thoroughly enjoy your annual lists of the best TV shows (The 50 best TV shows of 2020, 22 December), I cannot help noticing that non-English speaking programmes are never included. In recent years some of the most gripping and enjoyable shows have come from Germany (Babylon Berlin and Dark, for example), Scandinavia and other European countries. Perhaps, now that we are adrift politically, it is the time to embrace the wonders of European television.
Christina Neal
Cullercoats, Tyne and Wear
• However long it takes to rejoin the EU (Could Britain rejoin the EU? It seems like a hopelessly lost cause – but so did leaving, 1 January), the first aim should be to join the European Economic Area. That would at least restore some of the freedoms which Boris Johnson’s government has deprived us of.
Alan Pavelin
Chislehurst, Kent
• The word “bigly” is much older than William Morris’s usage in 1872 (Letters, 31 December). The earliest citation in the OED is around 1380, and there is a 1470 use by Thomas Malory in Le Morte d’Arthur: “So rowghly and so bygly that there was none myght withstonde hym.”
Keith Johnson
Sedbergh, Cumbria
• I suspect that more than one in 40 Guardian readers would say that they are extremely or very interested in classical music and opera. Yet this is the space you devoted to this topic in your Culture Preview 2021 edition of G2: one column out of eight pages.
Elizabeth Jurd
Great Horkesley, Essex
• Why leave the kids out? Surely it should be Sponge Bob Dylan Thomas Hardy Amies Bridge (Letters, 3 January).
Rahul Desai
London
