Tonight's TV highlights: Start Your Own School | Live Uefa Champions League | Gossip Girl | Michael Wood's Story of England | Secret Iraq | Mad Men

Start Your Own School | Live Uefa Champions League | Gossip Girl | Michael Wood's Story of England | Secret Iraq | Mad Men

Start Your Own School
7pm, BBC2

Free schools have been a hot political issue. A Conservative-backed initiative in which parents set up their own state-funded schools, it has been criticised by the left as a way of creating a middle-class ghetto. This film follows journalist Toby Young as he attempts to set up the West London Free School, which will offer a traditional, rigorous academic curriculum. The problems – from finding a suitable building to getting sufficient funding – are huge, and the endeavour is underpinned by the moral question of undermining state education with a potentially elitist alternative.

Live Uefa Champions League
7.30pm, ITV1

Manchester United did not make the most auspicious of starts, being held 0-0 at Old Trafford by a Rangers team most had confidently expected them to annihilate. Alex Ferguson may have been presumptuous in fielding a weakened team for that clash and it's doubtful he'll do the same against La Liga-topping Valencia, given that anything but a win will make this group stage unexpectedly hairy for United.

Gossip Girl
8pm, ITV2

So glamorous are the lives of our young New Yorkers, it's hard to keep up with them as they enter the real world. They even find it hard to keep up with each other – where in the world, exactly, has Chuck Bass been? As the omniscient Gossip Girl could tell us, he's been guest-starring in Californication – but he seems to have a story even more mysterious than that. In Paris, his former squeeze Blair doesn't seem unduly concerned to find out. She's being courted by a regal-looking stranger who can perhaps help with her princess tendencies.

Michael Wood's Story of England
9pm, BBC4

It's a tale of 1066 and all that lies immediately beyond that date as Michael Wood continues his history of England told via one Leicestershire village, Kibworth. At least initially, these were years of ruthless occupation, when an Anglo-Saxon ruling class was completely replaced by Norman invaders who loathed the native population's customs, especially the great English tradition of boozing and grumbling down the alehouse.

Secret Iraq
9pm, BBC2

This two-part doc looks at what happened to Iraq after the fall of Saddam, with this opener focusing on the insurgency. The film-makers tell the story from all sides – there are interviews with troops, spies, diplomats, Iraqi politicians, senior commanders, as well as the insurgents themselves, who speak of their motives and aims in attacking coalition forces. The big events are covered – Saddam's capture, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib – but told from the perspective of those whose experiences were often at odds with the picture presented by politicians and the media.

Mad Men
10pm, BBC4

This season seems to be about Don Draper trying to see if he actually has any character of his own – his man-without-a-past routine has turned him into a man-without-a-future. Tonight's episode also takes time to see how Pete and Peggy have grown, or, more accurately, changed. Both characters find themselves in situations that, on the surface, seem more suited to sitcoms or soaps: Pete's misunderstanding with his father-in-law, and Peggy hanging out with the cool beatniks. Pete gets to show his ruthless streak and Peggy finds herself out of step with her peers.