The year ahead in.... pop music I classical music I film I theatre I comedy I dance I visual arts

Repeats were once television's shame, indicated discreetly in Radio Times with a tiny double dagger symbol (quaintly, a single dagger indicated a “BBC recording”). Our expectations are different now. There is too much television for programme makers to fill and too much for viewers to watch. Some successful channels devote themselves to nothing but repeats. The BBC iPlayer is now considered part of the corporation's public service remit, making the missed unmissable, as its slogan does not quite have it.

Our complaints should now be directed not at repeats but repetition. The question is whether the new programmes of 2009 will bring anything new. No one, naturally, will object to the return of fresh episodes of old but successful programmes. The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency was liked in its feature-length version - albeit more by viewers than critics - and will start a six-week series in the spring on BBC One. The Armstrong and Miller Show, a comeback that surprised many by its quality last year, will, happily, return in the New Year. New Tricks, a deliberate re-animation of ancient TV detectives, is fabulously popular among viewers and will be back for a sixth run. As for Cranford - well, Christmas 2009 seems almost too long to wait for its sequel.

Digitally speaking, there are happy returns too. Mad Men, last year's best period drama, even if its period was 1960s Madison Avenue, will return to BBC Four. 24 is back on Sky 1 next month, retooled after an extended break awarded by the writers' strike. The same channel will broadcast the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica, which, as fans will tell you, is not so much a remake of the rubbish Seventies sci-fi soap, as a highly cerebral rethink.

The problem is that so many of 2009's apparently new offerings have a distinctly familiar, not to say musty, whiff about them. In January, Five will be declared an early victim of what one might call Survivors Syndrome. It has remade the Seventies classic Minder, placing Shane Richie in the Arthur Daley role (his nephew Archie) and Lex Shrapnel in the Dennis Waterman part.

But it is ITV that really inhabits reheat hell next year. The Prisoner, a mysterious, almost surreal spy series that its star Patrick McGoohan somehow got past Lew Grade in 1967, has been redone with Jim “Last Temptation” Caviezel playing the lead prisoner, Number Six, and Ian McKellen as Number Two. (“Who is Number One?” older viewers will ask, knowingly.) At least there will be progress in An Englishman in New York, a belated follow-up to one of the broadcaster's greatest dramas, its 1975 Quentin Crisp biopic, The Naked Civil Servant. John Hurt again stars. History has erected high bars for both of these projects to jump.

Expect more odious comparisons when Demons returns next month. A ghoul-hunting Saturday romp starring Philip Glenister, this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer in London. Similarly, one somehow doubts whether Kelly Reilly as Lynda La Plante's new woman cop in Above Suspicion will rival Helen Mirren's original in Prime Suspect. ITV's best bet may be Law & Order: UK, a 13-parter not only based on the US franchise but part-produced by its makers.

Channel 4, meanwhile, is bringing back it Great British Food Fight season, only a year after its first. Fearnley-Whittingstall, Oliver and Ramsay are all back but this time with Heston Blumenthal, the unlikely choice of chef to revitalise the Little Chef chain, in Big Chef, Little Chef (think Kitchen Nightmares).

After choirs and conductors, the next up-market talent show will be The Speaker, which will attempt to find Britain's best young public speaker. If you miss the choirs, its drama department has come up with a Sarah Lancashire/Neal Pearson vehicle, All The Small Things, in which northern choristers are certainly not singing from the same hymn sheet. And BBC Two is producing another one of its over-kill seasons, this time to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin of the Species, even though Richard Dawkins had his say on the matter on Channel 4 this year.

Look, then, to what is genuinely new. BBC One is to be praised for making its own drama based on the British occupation of Iraq. Written by Peter Bowker and starring James Nesbitt, Occupation follows three soldiers from the invasion of Basra in 2003 to the present day, which finds the trio back in Iraq. Small Island, meanwhile, is a two-part adaptation, scheduled for the autumn, of Andrea Levy's award-winning novel about Jamaican immigration to Britain in the Forties, a refreshing update on the period drama genre and on what TV executives regard as “classic” literature.

Plaudits are due the BBC too for an attempt to invigorate the daytime schedules with a Jimmy McGovern series, to be stripped across a week on One. Each episode of Moving On takes place in a house in which someone is either moving on or out. Whether Caroline Quentin's new BBC One sitcom, Life of Riley (theme: extended families) or Psychoville on BBC Two by the League of Gentlemen creators (“a dark character comedy mystery featuring the weird and wonderful) will represent originality or creative exhaustion, my colleague David Chater and I will let you know.

We both have high expectations of Joe Penhall's BBC Two drama Moses Jones. Penhall adapted Jake Arnott's The Long Firm and wrote Blue/Orange for the National, but this tale of crime and the supernatural, is his first original work for television. Best, on the same channel in the spring, stars Tom Payne as George Best dying of alcoholism. For a still more picaresque biopic we will need to wait until the end of the year and Desperate Romantics, about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. “Basically,” says Kate Harwood, who commissioned it for BBC Two, “it's Entourage with easels.”

Besides the channel's Darwin season, look out amid the new factual series for Around The World in 80 Faiths, presented by the charismatic, slightly nutty Anglican vicar Peter Owen. This is not to be confused with Around the World in 80 Trades on Channel 4 in which the former city trader Conor Woodman attempts to get rich another way by globally trading everything from chilli sauce to horses. Nor must 80 Faiths be mistaken for Four's Christianity: A History, a major eight-parter with a smorgasbord of presenters including Ann Widdecombe and Howard Jacobson.

In March, Channel 4 offers an ambitious drama trilogy adapted from David (The Damned Utd) Peace's Red Riding Quartet. It begins in Yorkshire in 1973 and the paranoia and police corruption grows over the decade. Andrew Garfield, of Boy A fame, stars. Equally promising is Endgame, a thriller about the end of apartheid in South Africa. Written by Paul Milne, it features William Hurt, demonstrating how real stars now believe television offers more interesting work than Hollywood.

Talking of which, Harvey Keitel has taken the Gene Hunt role in the US version of Life on Mars. This remake, surely about to be snapped up by someone over here, brings me full circle and, rather than earn a double dagger at the bottom of my own column, I'll end with the hope that there will be plenty that's good and plenty that's original in 2009. Whether the good will be original or the original good is another matter.

Must-see: Generation Kill (FX from January 25)

The most grown-up television of 2009 will be David Simon and Ed Burns’s mini-series recreating the Iraq War through a company of American Marines. It is a true story — real names are used — and it looks true too: visceral, unvarnished and lacking any music beyond the soldiers’ own singing. But it has been subtly fashioned into a compulsive story. War’s horror is there, but drama lies within the platoon as the men lose and gain faith in themselves and their commanders. That this is being shown on a channel not even available on Freeview highlights the scandal that the BBC never broadcast Simon and Burns’s masterpiece The Wire.

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