Aidan Smith's TV week: Nolly (ITVX), Hotel Portofino (ITVX), Pamela, a Love Story (Netflix)

It was the original wobbly-walled, woodenly-acted soap opera and I loved it. Home from school, tea would be supplied by Captain Birdseye while insights into the adult world came from - dah-da-da daaaah-dah - Crossroads.

Helena Bonham Carter as Noele Gordon in the Crossroads tribute Nolly For further information please contact: [email protected] 07909906963

This is all some time ago. Later in my teens, showing off newly-acquired critical faculties, I would learn less and laugh more. But what a joy to have the show recreated in Nolly (ITVX), Russell T. Davies’ loving biopic of motel matriarch Noele Gordon.

Crossroads obviously left its mark because in the ATV Green Room before the day’s shooting I identify every single character before names are uttered: bobble-hatted Benny, David Hunter (Mr Suave!), Adam Chance (Mr Suaver!), ninnyish, unlucky-in-love Jill, wee Hughie McPhee, the Scottish chef, and of course Meg Mortimer, the boss, who Helena Bonham Carter plays like Sunset Boulevard’s Norman Desmond and has an absolute ball.

The soap has a director and a producer but it’s Gordon who decides which lines stay in the script and which don’t. She arrives at the studios by Rolls-Royce, always greeted by fans with autograph books. On the day of Meg’s wedding there are 10,000 outside the church. Far too many to have on screen, insist the bosses, as Meg is the mere owner of a Midlands stopover with 16 chalets. Gordon fumes. These are people who can barely afford to heat their homes. What kind of heartless beasts would deny them “a faint little cheer” in the wind and rain?

Natasha McElhone leads the cast of Hotel Portofino

We learn some of Crossroads’ secrets. I used to wonder why the phone always rang - that’s obvious in a real motel although this was drama and so could have left out the mundane - but every episode had to be a strict 19 and a half minutes so when they “under-ran”, meaningless calls would make up the shortfall.

That involved a certain kind of heroism among the actors. Perhaps not enough to have anyone graduate from Soapland to the likes of Sarah Lancashire’s Happy Valley, but Gordon & Co were troupers all the same.

We also learn what life for the leading lady was like away from the set. Supper tout seul in her chintzy apartment, mostly, but there’s one evening where she gets her chauffeur to rev up the Rolls for some window shopping. Inevitably she meets another devotee who asks: “Why did they kill off your husband?” The reply comes back: “Because he was a lousy f***, darling!”

Then it’s Mortimer’s turn to be killed off. Brutally. The exec chortles as he speculates on how she might meet her end - “Maybe Concorde will fall on the motel.” Gordon wanted to walk off into the sunset, head held high, because she’d had enough real death - of her beloved mother and also Roger Tonge, who played screen son Sandy in a wheelchair and had suffered from Hodgkin’s disease. Thus Crossroads was the very first show to feature a leading disabled character, Raymond Burr’s wheelchair in Ironside having been a prop.

Pamela Anderson at the launch of her Netflix documentary

Suffering withdrawal symptoms following the end of The White Lotus, I suddenly think I’m confronted by heat haze through which I can make out a hotel in Italy welcoming the arrival of new guests. Tragically my hopes of a few extra episodes of that brilliant black comedy are dashed. The heat haze turns out to be grot on my screen. Hotel Portofino (ITVX), although in Italy, is the setting for a different drama, 1920s-based, kind of like Downton Abbey shifted to the shores of the Ligurian Sea.

The hotel is run by an Englishwoman, Bella Ainsworth (Natascha McElhone), who has a scoundrel for a husband, an unhappy single mum for a daughter and a tortured war casualty for a son. So, plenty going on there.

The scoundrel is blowing what profits there are which is a problem for Bella as it seems she’s about to be blackmailed by the local fascisti who’ve intercepted her letters to her lover. She’s just going to have to attract more custom, but how many rich snobs who snort “How very irregular!” and “Simply ghastly!” can there possibly be? (I know, lots).

Meanwhile she’s trying to marry off the son but somehow I don’t think unexciting Alice is going to make him give up his late-night romps with the Italian maid, who could be Monica Bellucci’s wee sister or indeed a great grand-niece of Gina Lollobrigida, RIP. Will I stick around to find out? I mean, the shots of the Italian Riviera are gorgeous, and almost make me want to nip down to Aldi for a bottle of £7.99 limoncello. But Anna Chancellor, as haughty as Dame Maggie Smith in Downtown although without the waspish wit, has started using it as a laxative.

Pamela, a Love Story (Netflix) is Pamela Anderson naked. Not naked, naked - we’ve seen that - but shorn of make-up, of husbands (she’s had five) and of fame’s searing flashbulbs. Back home in Ladysmith, British Columbia, she looks beautiful. Diaries are dug out to tell the story of her life: it amazes, amuses and appalls. Raped at 12, she didn’t tell her mother whose relationship with her father - “a poker player/chimney sweep/conman” - was difficult. Then, suddenly, Pam was a Playboy centrefold. Just as suddenly came Baywatch. Then, only four days after meeting him, marriage to Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee. “I always say,” she laughs, “that my boobs had a career and I was just tagging along.” Lee was possessive, forcing kissing scenes to be written out of Baywatch and smashing up her trailer, but love for her was always about “frenzy”.