WHAT’S HOT TO WATCH TODAY
BE honest with me now, did you realise Mary, Queen of Scots, was good at football? Or certainly keen on it, put it that way, both playing-wise and watching.
It’s one of the things we learn on this week’s episode of SECRET SCOTLAND (8pm, Channel 5), the series in which comedian and ex-Strictly contestant Susan Calman is touring her native land and learning stuff she never knew that she never knew, if you get my drift.
At Stirling Castle, where she spends much of tonight’s show, Susan is treated to a personal guided tour of the monarch’s old bedroom and it’s there that she discovers the actual ball Mary used to play with.
When I say “the actual ball”, what I specifically mean is “not the actual ball, sorry to have misled you there, but one that’s been made to look very similar” – the real thing, dating back to the 1540s, being housed these days in a museum.
But even so, that’s still pretty cool, right? There’s no evidence of whether Mary was much cop as a player, skills-wise, but at nearly 6ft I could certainly imagine her as a powerful central defender.
Having said that, her height was reduced by several inches in February 1587, owing to the fact she got her head chopped off. After that, I guess she’d have had to switch to more of an attacking midfield role.
ELSEWHERE tonight, in the last in the current run of GRANTCHESTER (9pm, ITV), Robson Green’s DI Geordie Keating has had his fill of the local teddy boys giving him grief.
“What we need,” he tells vicar Will, “is a good war. That’d stop this nonsense, sharpish…”