Raised By Wolves (Channel 4, 10pm)

STEP aside Shameless, the new female-dominated sitcom is this six-parter, where a play on the nickname of a sleeping giant of a Midlands football team allows scriptwriters Caitlin and Caz Moran to raid the memories of growing up in a large and rough-and-ready working class Wolverhampton family.

The action focuses on "verbally incontinent" home-schooled Germaine (Helen Monks), her introverted sister Aretha (Alexa Davies), who are based respectively on Caitlin and Caz as the teenagers deal with hormones, boredom and underage drinking under the gaze of single mother Della (Rebekah Staton).

The Morans shared a three-bed council house with their parents (who stayed together, unlike the family depicted in the series) and six siblings.

The family relied on benefits and, like their Raised By Wolves characters, were home-schooled – which mainly consisted of "watching classic MGM musicals whilst eating lumps of cheese on a stick," Caitlin says.

She adds that her parents shared one particular belief – "That people might try and come and get us. So we had very large rose bushes planted on the outside to stop people getting in, and the house would always have a very broken Volkswagen caravanette parked up on the front drive."

"Wolverhampton may not have looked glamorous, but it was a place where you could live and grow and pursue your interests," says London-based Caitlin, who became a columnist for The Times at the age of 18.

Raised By Wolves gave the sisters the chance not only to celebrate Wolverhampton, but to challenge the representation of the working class on shows such as Benefits Street and Shameless.

"You never see the working classes turning inwards and having a rich inner life on TV. You saw what our council estate was like, and there aren't mad, feral rat children parading around setting fire to cars, screaming and shouting and dealing drugs off tiny bicycles, and having sex with each other around the back of nightclubs. Although that stuff happens, that's not how most working class people are," says Caitlin.

"Our experience growing up on the estate was that it was mainly quite boring," Caz adds. "I would have loved for someone to be burning a mattress on the street corner. We used to watch Crimewatch to get a bit of drama in our lives."

The pair also want the show to be an antidote to TV crime shows where a woman's only purpose is to be bludgeoned to death.

"I'm just so bored of seeing dead women," says Caitlin. "You just realise how rarely you watch something where you see women getting on with their lives, having a really nice time, being funny and literate and just enjoying being themselves."

Arthur & George (ITV, 9pm)

AS the three-part series based on the life of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle draws to a close, viewers will no doubt be looking forward to finding out whether they will finally get some answers to the show's central mystery: including which side of the border that Martin Clunes' accent is going to land.

In the final episode, Arthur is determined to prove his critics wrong, and approaches the case with a renewed vigour as he attempts to find out whether George has been hiding anything. His fervour soon pays off as he discovers fresh evidence that suggests a very different explanation to the one found by the police.

Kew on a Plate (BBC2, 9pm)

IN the wake of funding cuts, which MPs called a "recipe for failure", we'd better make the most of Kew Gardens where Kate Humble and Raymond Blanc celebrate its 250-year history. The pair spent a year at the Richmond upon Thames park attempting to redevelop the long-lost produce plots. There's also a look at how war with France turned Britain into a nation of potato eaters as Kate looks back on the history of produce.

Viv Hardwick