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She made her name as the devil-may-care Samantha in Sex and the City, but her new CIA audio series tells a different story of female empowerment. She talks about life on screen, being childfree and finding love at the BBC

‘This could only happen on the radio,” Kim Cattrall says, from her home in Vancouver Island, of her new series Central Intelligence. “It would be much too expensive any other way.” She can say that again; the BBC Radio 4 podcast, with this incongruously glittering cast – Ed Harris also stars – tells the true story of the CIA, from its haphazard beginnings in the wreckage of postwar Europe, to 9/11, to the present day. Cattrall narrates as Eloise Page, nicknamed the “Iron Butterfly”, who became the first female station chief in 1978, but had been embedded in the agency since 1947, before it even had the name. “It was a time when women were treated either as a mum,...

Quirky television programs that blend horror, fantasy and folklore such as Supernatural have been a staple of network line-ups for decades. Obviously The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits are classics in the genre and set the bar for freaky quality. Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer came along and injected teen melodrama, genuine emotion and pop cultural quips into the horror/fantasy television playbook. Soon after Buffy’s success, a deluge of similar shows flooded the airwaves (Roswell, Angel, Charmed and so on). Supernatural studiously follows the path blazed by its predecessors. The initial season of Supernatural starts off strong, but begins to meander into a droll villain of the week formula. Though, it’s not how you start, but how you finish that matters. Does Supernatural finish strong? Double tap the jump to find out.

Sam Winchester’s (Jared Padalecki) quaint college lifestyle is hampered when older...