The TV shows you need to watch this week: From Hatton Garden to Gentleman Jack

Sean O’Grady rounds up the essential viewing over the coming days

Timothy Spall and co star in a new series about the daring (not to say bonkers) Hatton Garden raid (ITV)

Highlight of the week has to be feasting on the ever-fascinating, ever-silly and ever-hilarious story of the Hatton Garden raid, during which some pensioners stole around £200m of gems and other loot from a London jewellers over the Easter bank holiday in 2015. The oldest of the “gang” – such a youthful word – was 78; the ringleader was 57. Yet age did not weary them, a few mobility issues aside. The daring, not to say bonkers, expedition has already been the subject of three feature films, and now comes the inevitable, and much-delayed, TV series.

Again, almost inevitably but also very welcome, we find Timothy Spall and Kenneth Cranham in the leads, supported by talent as strong as Amira Ghazalla and T’Nia Miller, and writing from Jeff Pope and Terry Winsor.

Like the Great Train Robbery in 1966, and that strange aquatic raid in 2000 on the Millennium Dome and its star exhibit, the £200m Millennium Star Diamond, the Hatton Garden caper is much more of a success as the basis of a film than a serious criminal endeavour. Usually you might count four nightly episodes of an hour each something of an indulgence, but I have feeling that the nation will remain enthralled by this most heroic of British failures.

Suranne Jones is a fine choice for the title role of ‘Gentleman Jack’ (BBC)

Famous in her time but mostly fairly obscure since is Anne Lister. Regarded as the “first modern lesbian”, she was a wealthy industrialist and gentlewoman who lived out her sexuality in a manner that was pretty brave in the early 19th century, just as the more licentious ways of the Regency era were giving way to the strictures of Victorian respectability.

Anyway, she was known as “Gentleman Jack” to her fellow citizens in West Yorkshire, and “Fred” by her lover. Her extensive diaries detailed her lifestyle, though the code in which they were couched were not cracked until the 1930s, and it has taken until fairly recently for her pioneering ways to be recognised.

Suranne Jones seems an excellent choice to play this strong-willed woman who did much for her community but, given the climate of the times, less for the cause of sexual tolerance. There are eight episodes to enjoy, and it is a remarkable sign of our times that the arrival of the drama is greeted with an air of celebration; well within living memory it would have provoked the most painful of controversies.

Nigel Farage may insist – rather too theatrically – that the BBC is a biased organisation infiltrated by EU secret agents and riven with snobby, elitist attitudes, but it is of course anything but. The Thatcher years, and indeed their aftermath and her death in 2013, tested the corporation’s journalism and reputation for impartiality to the very utmost – not least because Margaret Thatcher herself hardly ever agreed to be interviewed by it. She saw it as some sort of Marxist and terrorist nest, as did her influential husband Denis, and she imposed a broadcasting ban on the words of Sinn Fein politicians, and she got one DG the sack. So Farage’s hostility is nothing new; and then, as now, the BBC was also attacked by the left for its cosy capitalist, centrist bias.

Anyway, 30 years on from the 1979 election that brought Thatcher to power and Thatcherism into the English language, the BBC is having a little look back in Thatcher: A Very British Revolution. It will be scrupulously fair; but no one will believe it to be.

Maybe a bit of escapism? The second run of the harmless nonsense Riviera debuts on Sky Atlantic on Thursday evening (by which point you should have voted in the elections to the European parliament, of course). Apparently Georgina has stabbed Adam on their luxury yacht, and carries on as normal, shopping in the chi chi boutiques of Monaco..Like you do. As I say, fairly escapist stuff, in all senses.

Lesley Manville leads a strong cast in ‘Mum’ (BBC)

I can also recommend, more wholeheartedly, Mum. This is the story of a middle-aged widow, Cathy (Lesley Manville) trying to get on with her life, and the will-they-won’t they relationship she has tentatively struck up with Michael (Peter Mullan). Not much happens, but we care about whether it ever will, which is why the show, written and directed by Stefan Golaszewski, has been such a well-appreciated success.

Manville and Mullan play off each other with an almost telepathic quality, and there are supported by a stonking array of talent, old and young – and especially Dorothy Atkinson as the snobby, ghastly woman. Pauline, who Cathy’s brother has somehow wound up with. Not since Patricia Routledge’s Hyacinth Bucket have we witnessed such a shimmering display of social climbing as Pauline with a champagne flute in her hand, by the swimming pool naturally.

Summer of Rockets shouldn’t go far wrong. A the title indicates, it’s set in 1957, when the Russians were checking their Sputniks and blameless mutts into outer space, and the Americans were desperately trying to play catch-up. Such superpower rivalry has a timeless quality, don’t you think? Then as now, paranoia donates international relations, which are rarely relaxed.

Toby Stephens, Linus Roache and Keeley Hawes star, which is as good a start as anyone can hope for, and with a script and direction by Stephen Poliakoff it should be more than competent. Hawes and Roache star as a posh couple who get tangled up with the whole Cold War spying thing. Echoes of Profumo, Philby, Burgess and Maclean, Kruschchev, Dulles and Macmillan; twin sets, pearls, trilbies and pin-striped double breasted suits; clipped accents; cars by Austin, Wolseley and Hillman – you get the picture. Retro-lush.

Hatton Garden (ITV, Monday to Thursday 9pm); Gentleman Jack (BBC1, Sunday 9pm); Thatcher: A Very British Revolution (BBC2, Monday 9pm); Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday 9pm); Mum (BBC2, Wednesday 10pm); Summer of Rockets (BBC2, Wednesday 9pm)