By Sian Brewis

Forget Simon Cowell's put-downs – he's a pussycat compared with the heckling faced by the acts on Britain's Got Talent, 1903.

In Newcastle and Glasgow, if they didn't like the music hall show, they threw steel rivets; East End crowds lobbed rotten veg. Hecklers in some parts of the country even hurled dead cats on stage.

Andrew Marr's masterly History of Modern Britain (BBC2, 9pm) was a treasure trove of plum anecdotes peppering the whole fascinating shebang.

He's even taken to doing lots of voices like a one-man radio play, down to Cock-er-nee accents which wouldn't have sounded amiss with Dick Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins.

It began with a death – Queen Victoria's – and footage of her funeral and the thousands lining the streets. "From the death of Queen Victoria to the end of the Second World War is a paltry space of time," he said. "By the end it was a country shaken from top to toe."

Marr's a consummate storyteller; and his ability to spin a good yarn means he dives expertly around weighty subjects like Victorian politics, the horrors of the Boer War, social reforms and eugenics without the whole thing feeling like a lecture.

There's the tale of Lloyd George fleeing a baying mob of 30,000 Joe Chamberlain supporters in Birmingham by running out the back of the town hall, disguised as a policeman; the bizarre idea to "breed better Britons" inspired by Basset hounds – "poor people should be discouraged from breeding," said academics – and the rise of Votes for Women saw suffragettes spitting when told to "act like ladies".

Marr even gets to indulge a boyhood fantasy, driving along country lanes in a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost worth a cool £25milion.

It was certainly better than Rolls' next invention – a plane which crashed on its maiden flight, killing him instantly.

YOU wouldn't want Heston Blumenthal checking up on your cooking, unless you were a spectacularly confident chef. And Kelvin, the "executive development chef" at Little Chef, isn't. Heston says he hated his chicken pie. So Kelvin serves up chicken and mushroom. That'll sort it.

"You're not looking for a better product," berates the bald one. "You've not found the answer in two and a half years." Ouch.

A year after his famous experiment to sort out Little Chef, Heston – accompanied by the strains of The Ipcress File – returned to find that standards had slipped. As Did Heston Change Little Chef (C4, 9pm) discovered, the sauces were rubbish, the chicken was hard and the gravy had lumps in it.

What had changed was the frosty relationship between Heston and chief executive Ian. After HB had got them into the Good Food Guide, they had a love-in."You've done a great job," said Heston. "No, you've done a great job," swooned Ian. You half expected a group hug.