Season 2008 2008

TV-G

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the popular romance publishing phenomenon Mills and Boon, a colourful and camp drama which charts the witty and moving stories of three very different women affected by the brand's success: co-founder Charles Boon's wife Mary, daydreaming 1970s writer Janet and modern day literature lecturer Kirstie.

Drama starring David Tennant and Andy Serkis. In the spring of 1914, with Europe on the brink of war, no one had heard of an obscure German physicist called Albert Einstein. A British astronomer, Arthur Eddington, realised that Einstein's theories could unlock whole new ways of thinking about time and space.

Despite the danger of being labelled traitors, the two men began a unique correspondence. An eclipse in Africa provided an opportunity to prove Einstein's theories to the world. Eddington, an unlikely hero, set out on a journey that would change people's perceptions of the universe forever.

Starring Ken Stott (Rebus, Messiah) as troubled comic genius Tony Hancock and Maxine Peake (Cinderella, Shameless) as Joan, Hancock and Joan charts the final year of his life.

Only months after her marriage to Dad's Army favourite John Le Mesurier, Joan Le Mesurier fell in love with his best friend, the godfather of British sitcom, Tony Hancock.

Moving family drama, based on Jacqueline Wilson's novel, following the story of a teenager who sets out to discover her origins and, along the way, discovers where she belongs.

Having been left in a dustbin as a baby, the 14-year-old walks out on her foster mother following a row and determines to discover her past. As her foster mother searches frantically for her, their journeys take them on a course that will change their lives forever.

While young April goes back into the world foster care, remembering and revisiting the people who shaped her life, her foster mother tries to understand where she went wrong and finally goes in search of the dustbin where the baby was found 14 years before.

Drama based on John Buchan's classic novel, set in the lead-up to the First World War. When an undercover British spy is killed in his flat, a man finds himself accused of murder and caught up in a deadly conspiracy which threatens not only his life, but the safety of the nation.

Pursued by spies and the police, he reluctantly joins forces with a feisty suffragette as he attempts to uncover the truth and save Great Britain from invasion.

Focussing on the young Margaret Thatcher's steely determination to get selected to a "winnable" Tory seat in the Fifties, successful novelist and TV newcomer, Tony Saint's script imagines what might have gone on behind the scenes during her ten–year struggle as she was rejected by a succession of five home counties Tory selection committees until – against considerable local opposition – she was finally selected for the seat that she became identified with for the rest of her political career.

Candid and poignant drama about the comedian Frankie Howerd and the relationship with his long-term, long-suffering manager, and gay partner, Dennis Heymer. Despite his overtly camp persona, Howerd kept his companionship with Heymer under wraps for 35 years, until his death in 1992. Yet through career disaster, social stigma, illegality, numerous infidelities and Howerd's own deep-seated issues about his homosexuality, their love endured.

Dramatisation of the life of Vera Brittain, a young woman who lived through the First World War, presented by Jo Brand.

In 1914 Vera Brittain was young, in love and preparing to study at Oxford. She was at the heart of an intense friendship that bound five youngsters (four young men and Vera) together, full of ambition and excitement. Four years later, her life and the life of her whole generation had changed unimaginably. The war saw her companions killed. As a volunteer nurse in London and on the Front she witnessed horrors that turned her idealistic passion for a 'just war' to dust. This is the story of the First World War as seen through a woman's eyes.

Through Vera's letters, memoirs and her celebrated autobiography Testament of Youth, Jo Brand retells the story of Vera's war that saw her brother Edward, her fiance Roland Leighton and their friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow killed, along with an army of boys recruited through their schools. What emerges is a profoundly moving portrait. The correspondence is unmatched in the depth and breadth of its perspective, showing the war as it was for the young officer in the trenches, the volunteer nurse in military hospitals at home and abroad, and the civilian population on the home front. It is unique, yet tells the experience of thousands of people in Britain at the time.

Jo uses these letters, school reports, army and hospital records to trace Brittain's experiences. She visits the sites of hospitals in Camberwell and France, the home and university that served as refuge, and talks with Baroness Shirley Williams, Brittain's daughter, about the war's impact on her mother. Dramatic reconstructions reproduce key moments from the story.

Drama about the secret life of Opportunity Knocks and Double Your Money presenter Hughie Green, based on the inside story from his family, friends and peers. It tells of the destructive power of success and celebrity from Green's earliest days as a child star, and explores what family and fatherhood meant to this iconic character, who harboured an explosive secret that would rock the entertainment world after his death in 1997

Drama inspired by the life of Walter Tull who, after years in an orphanage, went on to become a professional footballer and then the first black commissioned officer to lead British troops during WW1.

The action concerns Tull's turbulent passage from ordinary soldier to extraordinary officer at officer training camp, where he had to face his own demons as well as fight the prejudice that surrounded him.

In the later years of her life, as she's approaching the age of forty, the novelist Jane Austen helps her niece find a husband.

Drama telling the moving story of life behind the scenes of Steptoe and Son. Two actors find themselves trapped together on the celebrated long-running sitcom.

Debbie lives a poor lifestyle in Britain along with her spouse, and three children, two girls and a boy. The neighborhood is predominantly Islamic and there is a Mosque within a stone's throw of their residence. Foul-mouthed, she finds herself being abused by her spouse, often publicly, and ends up neglecting her children. She, as well as her spouse, are alarmed and shaken when they find out her eldest, Leah, has accepted Islam as her Faith, and when confronted, decides to move out to live with a neighbouring Muslim family. Watch what impact this action has on Debbie, the rest of her family, as well as their neighbours.

In 1963 an unknown housewife and teacher from the Midlands, Mary Whitehouse, embarked on a mission to clean up British television. Her crusade led her into battle with the man she held responsible for a tide of 'filth' - Sir Hugh Carleton-Greene, Director-General of the BBC.

With Julie Walters starring as Mary Whitehouse and Hugh Bonneville as her arch enemy, this is a drama inspired by real events that brings life to the battle for Britain's morals.