The Street (BBC1, 9pm); The Great London Jump: Robbie Maddison (five, 7.30pm); Only Connect (BBC4, 8.30pm).

AWISE man once said that there isn’t a film, TV show, stage production or nativity play that couldn’t be improved by a Bob Hoskins cameo. But viewers get a whole lot more than a walk-on when he stars in the first of a new series of The Street.

He plays reformed alcoholic and salt-ofthe- earth cockney Paddy Gargan, landlord of The Greyhound, which he runs alongside his hard-working wife, Lizzie (Frances Barber).

The pub is the hub of the community where everyone drinks and has their dos.

But Paddy’s biggest spending customer is local gangster Thomas Miller (Liam Cunningham), who also finances the Greyhound’s football team.

Then, after footie one day, Paddy catches Miller’s son, Callum, (Robert Elms) smoking in the toilets and bars him from the pub. He has to be seen to mean business – the smoking fine is £5,000.

Miller is furious and challenges Paddy to “unbar” Callum, but Paddy’s resolute.

Miller says if Paddy won’t serve him and his son at 3.30 the next day, he’ll break every bone in his body.

Paddy’s son, Liam, (David Atkins) threatens to stab Miller if there’s any trouble. Lizzie begs him to go to the police or to keep the pub closed the next day, but Paddy won’t.

Hoskins was lured back to television by two words – Jimmy and McGovern. “I love what he does with a script. The whole concept behind this episode is fantastic.

It’s Jimmy’s version of High Noon,” says the actor.

He sees Paddy as a very ordinary bloke, a Londoner who met Lizzie and moved to Manchester with her. He changed his life to be with her.

“They’ve run the pub for 20 years. He’s a simple man – she’s the boss and the brains. She does the book-keeping and knows how everything works,” explains Hoskins.

“He’s not a tough guy or a hard nut, but he takes a courageous stand against Miller. The point is he’s already banned one kid for smoking. If he lets Calum off, he’ll be in line for a five grand fine – stuff that.”

It’s a brave stand and Robbie Maddison appears to be a brave fellow too, being described as a “daredevil stunt man and motocross star” in the publicity for five’s The Great London Jump.

In the past, he’s jumped the length of an American football field and scaled the heights of the replica Arc de Triomphe in Las Vegas. Now he’s planning a leap in London.

The location will be revealed shortly before broadcast, but he won’t just be picking a place at random and turning up as we’re told, “to pull it off, the stunt will require intense planning and nerves of steel as the fearless biker rides out into the unknown”.

In 2007, Robbie travelled 98 metres through the air over a football field and the following year he smashed his own record. Twice. He set a final distance of 106.9 metres.

FANCY a quiz that’s a tad more cerebral than Total Wipeout? Only Connect isn’t the sort of telly contest that sees people bouncing off inflatables or forcing themselves through foam holes while dressed in silver Lycra. This attempts to plug the gap in the market for quizzes that actually require the contestants to have done their homework.

It also offers the humble viewer at home the chance to watch people with enormous brains – and egos to match – look suddenly panic-stricken when they realise they don’t know an answer.

Three men from the Cambridge Quiz Society pit their wits against a trio of Oxford librarians to try to make connections between things that at first do not appear to be linked.

Victoria Coren keeps things entertaining in the presenter’s chair, in this show which makes Eggheads’ contestants seem positive thickies.