To Walk Invisible (BBC1, 9pm)

CREATOR of Happy Valley and Last Tango in Halifax, Sally Wainwright, admits dodging out of a BBC approach to write a bicentennial piece celebrating Charlotte Bronte's birth in 2016.

"They wanted a biopic, and it could have been a fill series, but I wanted to focus on the Brontes as mature adults. So, I chose the three-year period leading up to Branwell Bronte's death in 1848," Wainwright says in Radio Times about this one-off look at the famous Bronte sisters.

"The tragic aspect of the Brontes – three of the siblings died within ten months of one another – has always been a draw, but in this film I really didn't want them to be defined by their deaths. What fascinates me is the fact of three literary geniuses sitting in the same room, and the fact that they were all women. It's an extraordinarily compelling story, and I hope I've done it justice," she adds.

Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte wrote some of the greatest novels in the English language, but their own life stories have also fascinated generations of readers. Wainwright, who has also brought At Home With the Braithwaites and Scott & Bailey to TV screens, includes in her cv Sparkhouse, an updated version of Wuthering Heights.

Chloe Pirrie, who plays Emily in the drama, was certainly hooked by the script. She says: "I loved it! I just thought it was brilliantly written, with amazing stage directions and brilliant descriptions. I really understood who these people were immediately, having not known a huge amount about them before. I'd read the books but I didn't know much about them and the family, but the characters just leapt off the page."

Pirrie has had something of a breakout year with roles in War and Peace, The Living and the Dead and Brief Encounters. "I read Wuthering Heights when I was about 15 or 16, and when I got this job I re-read it and had such a different experience.

"Wuthering Heights is portrayed as a great romantic novel and when I read it again I thought, 'how is this romantic? All these people are horrible to each other.' It's just such a fantastic vivid, violent book in a way that I hadn't processed."

Our ideas about Charlotte (Finn Atkins) and Anne (Charlie Murphy) are about to be challenged as well. The sisters are living in Yorkshire and facing a bleak future as their father Patrick (Jonathan Pryce) is half blind and their alcoholic brother Branwell (Adam Nagaitis) is in serious decline.

The Adele Story (C5, 9pm)

DOCUMENTARY charting the remarkable career trajectory of Adele Adkins, the pop and blue-eyed soul singer who rose from humble beginning in Tottenham to become one of the biggest stars of the modern music industry. Adele's interest in music was encouraged by her mother from an early age. Winning a place at the Brit School in Croydon, Adele first shot into the public eye when her friend uploaded a demo to MySpace in 2006, and by the time she graduated, the singer had already secured a record deal. What followed were three hugely successful albums, 19, 21 and 25, each of which surpassed the last in terms of critical acclaim and sales figures.

Bruce Springsteen: In His Words (C4, 10.35pm)

AS if selling 160 million albums worldwide wasn't enough of an achievement, rock legend Bruce Springsteen is also conquering the world of literature – he released his critically acclaimed autobiography, Born to Run, earlier this year. But if you're still wondering what makes the man his fans like to call 'The Boss' tick, then this 90-minute documentary should provide some answers. In an intimate conversation, Bruce explores what drove him to become a musician, sheds new light on the inspirations behind some of his best-loved songs, and explains why he's still motivated to make new music. It also draws on archive footage, including home videos of the young Bruce and clips of his early years as a solo performer in New York's Greenwich Village.

Viv Hardwick