Apologies @cheezopath and @holroy for the very late reply. Took an unwelcome trip to the outskirts of hell and not had time to look at my vault for weeks. Thanks to both of you for the replies and help.
That works, and it looks beautiful in Dataview. Unfortunately, it isn’t ‘native’ in terms of Properties, and I just don’t want to structure data in a way that might be troublesome with future builds of Obsidian. So as it is, your idea is exactly what I want as a design, but I won’t use it because of Properties and the as-yet-unknown parameters of the core Dynamic Views plugin, which I plan to switch to in the future.
I don’t understand how each list item being a different episode would be structured. Would such a structure be supported by Properties, or would it work but be seen as an error by Properties?
I am cleaning up my vault in readiness for the core Dynamic Views plugin. I don’t want to use Dataview or Datacore in the future (reasons explained here, if you are really bored and have nothing else to read or do 
).