PICK OF DIGITAL & ON DEMAND TV

ROYAL MOB, 9PM, SKY HISTORY

‘ROYAL MOB’ was apparently the term Queen Victoria used for her vast extended family, who once ruled most of Europe. Of her 42 grandchildren, her favourites were the four Hesse sisters, each of whom married into a powerful European court. Victoria, Elisabeth, Irene and Alexandra moved in an elevated, aristocratic world in which fallings-out between relatives didn’t just mean bickering at family occasions, they led to revolutions and world wars. Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em’s Michele Dotrice plays Victoria in this colourful new, four-part series, which combines lively drama about the Hesse sisters’ lives — the script is by Skins’ Jamie Brittain and Ten Percent’s Abigail Wilson — with contributions from historians such as Miranda Carter and Simon Sebag Montefiore, and has a punchy feel throughout. It opens with the marriage of Princess Victoria to Prince Louis of Battenberg (Richard Winsor, pictured with Phoebe Marshall as Elisabeth) — an occasion marred by scandal

when Ludwig arrives and promptly announces he has secretly married his Russian mistress. And Russians are very much not in Victoria’s good books after the Crimean War . . .