Television: today's pick
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Your support makes all the difference.Picture This: War Dancing (9.30pm BBC2) The Reel of the 51st is a favourite at Highland balls, apparently, but very few people are aware of its origins - a lapse which Kate Bannatyne's film makes good. Some 180,000 British soldiers were left in France after Dunkirk - including 10,000 soldiers of the 51st Highland division captured in June 1940 on the Normandy coast. They spent the next five years in various PoW camps in Germany, where there was little to do but think about food and plot escape bids. Some officers of the 51st amused themselves by making up a country dance based on the insignia of the St Andrew's Cross. The reel spread to other camps, and when men tried to send details back to Scotland, the Germans understandably believed that the dance-step shorthand was some kind of secret code.
Panorama (10pm BBC1) Looks at the hitherto taboo subject of sexual abuse by women - from mothers who commit incest to female paedophiles occupying positions of trust in the community. "People have got this image in their head of a dirty old man abusing children," says the mother of a girl subjected to sexual abuse while in the professional care of a woman. Su Pennington reports.
Gilda (3.30pm C5) Forties sex goddess Rita Hayworth's career reached its zenith at the hands of her favourite director, Charles Vidor, in this daffy melodrama which throws together tungsten cartels, casino operators and Nazis down Buenos Aires way. Hayworth's chanteuse memorably pulls off her silk gloves as she sings (or rather Anita Ellis sings; Hayworth was always dubbed) "Put the Blame on Mame" - sexual teasing unsurpassed until Marilyn Monroe got into her stride a decade later.
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