Cradle to Grave (BBC2, 9pm)

IT'S 1974 and 15-year-old Danny Baker (played by Laurie Knaston) is our guide through the ups and downs of life with his family, adapted from Baker's autobiography Going to Sea in a Sieve by the author and writer Jeff Pope. With eldest daughter Sharon's (Alice Sykes) wedding looming and the docks facing closure, times are challenging. So too are Danny's attempts to get closer to the opposite sex.

Dad Fred (Peter Kay) is known to all and sundry as Spud, a proud South London docker with a penchant for rackets, fiddles and schemes. His wife Bet (Lucy Speed) loves him deeply, but longs for the day when they do quaint things – like put money in the electricity meter.

Then there's Danny's older brother Michael (Frankie Wilson), with his modish and much mocked head attire, and sister Sharon who with her plimsoll-wearing boyfriend is about to take Danny to the theatre for a West End experience he will never forget. Throw in a coveted item of clothing, a rogue tortoise and an early brush with death and it's business as usual at 11 Debnams Road.

Speculation has surrounded how the irrepressible Northern comic Kay can turn himself into Spud and Baker admits that he doesn’t sound like his real-life docker and union man Dad.

“Peter, yes, Bolton to his boots – but he’s also an actor. He always wanted to be like his hero Ronnie Barker and he has that quality – I think he’s the natural heir to that sort of actor. “He’s not an impersonator. But that’s how his character talks, so I’m not precious. The point is it’s a London accent I grew up never hearing London accents anyway. I mean, what Ronnie Barker did in Porridge, I don’t know what part of London that was," Baker told The Radio Times.

The eight-part drama pays painful attention to recreating the physical details of Baker’s early life (“they found the exact wallpaper I had in my bedroom”), but he says that the TV adaptation “doesn’t feel personal”.

Despite featuring the death of young Danny’s friend Martin (Ross McCormack) in episode one, the plot retains an upbeat attitude with Baker feeling his life has been "a Polyanna carousel of tremendous good fortune and happen stance…I am literally known for it. Quite rightly we hear a lot about mental health and depression, but let’s hear it for us euphoric once in a while. I genuinely think I am a euphoric.”

Baker doesn't like to dwell on his recovery from throat cancer in 2011. “Everybody wants to talk about it. It was bad enough the first time around. I don’t want to relive it,” he says.

Jamie's Sugar Rush (C4, 9pm)

EXPERTS are warning that excess sugar is as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco, contributing to huge rises in obesity and type 2 diabetes. He meets people suffering the devastating effects of type 2 diabetes, including leg amputation, and talks to a dentist who frequently has to remove milk and adult teeth from primary school children. Jamie analyses a typical day's food and drink and reveals how much sugar is getting into our healthy-looking foods without us realising. And he travels to Mexico, where more than two thirds of adults are obese or overweight and type 2 diabetes is the leading cause of death. He decides to introduce a surcharge on cold drinks with added sugar sold in his UK restaurants, with the money raised going to food education programmes.

Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1, 9pm)

JERRY Hall sets out to discover how her father's family, who she knew were originally from Oldham, ended up in the United States, and her investigation takes her from the cotton mills of Lancashire to the plains of Texas at the time of the railroad. She also explores her mother's side of the family and discovers her ancestors' pioneering roots as they headed west across the United States at the time of the Frontier, and finds out about a connection to the original pioneer and American folk hero Daniel Boone.