PICK OF DIGITAL & ON DEMAND TV

ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE, BBC iPLAYER

WE ALL know a Victor Meldrew, a grumpy older chap with a short fuse who is, all the same, tolerated fondly. That was a big part of the charm of this 1990s sitcom, which starred Richard Wilson as the cranky retiree with the now-legendary catchphrase, ‘I don’t believe it!’. Just as timeless — we all know a spouse like her — was long-suffering wife Margaret (Annette Crosbie, pictured with Wilson), the exasperated yin to Victor’s ranting yang. But rather than being the villain, Victor was our hero. We understood why he got so irritated, because it was often by the same things that drive us crazy, from call centres to shoddy workmanship. When the series ended, Victor had passed on, hopefully to a well-organised heaven that gave no cause for complaint. It’s probably for the best that he’s no longer with us — imagine what he’d make of paperless billing or, God forbid, watching catch-up TV. It was a career-defining role for Wilson, and tomorrow on Radio 4 at 11.30am he begins a new, sixth series of Believe It, his spoof autobiography, ‘based on glimmers on truth’.

BEKONSCOT Model Village, in Buckinghamshire (pictured), is the oldest model village in the world. The foundation stones were laid in the 1920s by an accountant called Roland Callingham. The project was just a private obsession, but Roland kept adding to the village and its landscape, and it’s now a popular tourist attraction. The novelist Max Porter, a regular visitor as a child, tells the story of