TINA AND BOBBY, STV, 9pm
I LOVE period drama which isn’t stiffened by corsets or fluffed up with crinolines. We’ve had a good run of them recently with the BBC’s Rillington and ITV’s In Plain Sight which both looked at the post-war era and now here’s another – although this one doesn’t contain murderers but footballers.
Tina and her friend queue under the neon lights of the Palais, dolled up to the nines. A good-looking chap is giving her the eye and her friend whispers that he’s a footballer for West Ham. “That’s not a job,” she sneers.
This new series tells the story of Bobby Moore and his wife Tina and their young love in 1960s London. Tina is played by Michelle Keegan and Patsy Kensit plays her no-nonsense mother.
Any hopes young Tina has of a nice, conventional marriage are turned upside down when her husband becomes the England captain at just 23 and goes on to be a football superstar, battling cancer along the way.
SOUND OF MUSICALS WITH NEIL BRAND, BBC4, 9pm
I DON’T know about you but for me Christmas is all about making my boyfriend watch musicals.
He may have shuddered when I said I’d never seen Star Wars but I almost collapsed when he revealed he’d never watched The Sound of Music.
Although the festive season is over it doesn’t mean we need to surrender our musicals because this three-part series lets us glory in them for a few weeks more.
Tonight we start with the musicals of the early 20th century. The heyday of the form was surely the mid-century but we can’t celebrate the greats without going back to understand its roots which sprang from jaunty Edwardian musical comedy.
We look at Show Boat by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, moving on to Annie Get Your Gun and Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady which made Julie Andrews famous in the 1950s.
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