She won four Oscars for playing bold women yet was too afraid to attend the ceremonies; she was a tough businesswoman whose father looked after her money; and she was a lifelong feminist who quietly accepted the role of “the other woman” for 30 years.

The subject of Katharine Hepburn: Call Me Kate (Sky Arts, Monday, 8pm) was all these contradictions and more. Now Hepburn is a role model from a Hollywood era when so many women actors were used and spat out by the studio machine. Some still are, and it is a testament to Lorna Tucker’s excellent film that after viewing it one knows exactly what Miss Hepburn would have thought of such behaviour.

Tucker brings together footage, photographs and interviews, including with Hepburn herself, to create a portrait of a complex woman. Though much is said by and about her, there is a sense at the end that Hepburn kept a lot back.

Hepburn came from money. She grew up “wild and free” at the family home in Connecticut, her doctor father and suffragette mother encouraging their children to be independent. It was “the perfect, happiest of childhoods,” she would later tell an interviewer.

But it was brought to a terrible end by a family tragedy, one that bred in her a determination to succeed. A part in the school play showed her what she wanted to do with her life, and she set off for New York and the theatre.

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After several stage hits she moved to Hollywood. There were flops at first. Depression-era audiences didn’t like her rich girl air and plummy voice. She was spoken of as “box office poison”.

But she stuck at it, finding opportunities or creating them. When she found a play or script she liked, she negotiated deals with the studio bosses - a feat unheard of for women then. Decades of success followed, including four Oscars (Morning Glory, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, and On Golden Pond).

She found her great love, too, in Spencer Tracy. Though devoted to each other, it was not a fairytale relationship. As with much else to do with Hepburn, it was complicated.

Come Tuesday morning there will be a Succession-shaped hole in our lives (sob). I’m not suggesting White House Plumbers (Sky Atlantic/Now, Tuesday, 9pm) will go anywhere near filling the gap, but it’s worth a look.

This is the story of Watergate, the scandal that toppled a US President, but told from the ground up. Woody Harrelson plays former CIA agent Howard Hunt, with Justin Theroux as ex-FBI man Gordon Liddy. After a run of government leaks, the pair are called upon by White House plotters to help re-elect Nixon.

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It was a serious business, but that is not the approach taken here. White House Plumbers (“We fix leaks”) is played for laughs, the wry tone set by an opening caption that tells viewers “no names have been changed to protect the innocent because nearly everyone was found guilty”.

Harrelson has a lot of fun with super-patriot Hunt (“God damn Jane Fonda”) while Liddy’s crazy obsession with a certain German dictator is gleefully reproduced. No matter how bizarrely the story develops, the fiction still probably goes nowhere near the truth. Crazy days, crazy people.

Not that Britain in the same period was a paragon of peace and harmony, as we see in The Blackouts of 74: When Britain Went Dark (Channel 5, Tuesday, 9pm).

During the recent wave of industrial action there was talk, some bordering on nostalgic, about the return of power cuts and life by candlelight. But if you weren’t there (I was), what was it really like?

Flipping awful with moments of extreme silliness is the short answer after watching this 90-minute documentary.

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Welcome to a Britain hit by soaring fuel prices caused by war, a cost of living crisis, spiralling inflation and strikes. Remind you of anything?

With the Prime Minister of the time, Edward Heath, determined not to give in to the miners’ demand for a 35% pay rise, the country was put on a three-day working week plus scheduled power cuts. Candles sold out almost immediately. There was a rush on toilet rolls too.

Some of the talking heads here look back with fond memories. Pete Waterman, then a DJ, speaks of the “wonderful camaraderie”. Fern Britton remembers playing board games with the family by candlelight, while Janey Godley recalls her maw trying to take electricity from the street lights.

But 1974 had plenty of ugliness to offer besides, with IRA bombings on the mainland, violence on the picket lines, and wage cuts cutting even further into family budgets.

Just when the year could not get more bizarre, the streaking trend started.

The miners eventually won their pay rise and toppled Heath. But ten years later history repeated itself with another miners strike, but this time a new PM was in charge …