Does anyone still watch televised beauty pageants? Some must do: The likes of Miss America and Miss World presumably aren’t being broadcast to a global audience of ghosts, whatever their declining presence in the popular imagination. Yet for years now, the pageant industry has felt like a dead woman walking and waving, steadily losing TV ratings and youth appeal, however many concessions it makes to more progressive standards of femininity: Banning the swimsuit round might help, but something larger is being denuded anyway. A bouncy fact-based Britcom in the “Made in Dagenham” vein, Philippa Lowthorpe’s “Misbehaviour” marks the point at which the worm turned. Revisiting the protest-blighted 1970 Miss World contest from the alternating perspective of participants and opposing activists, it’s cheery, easy comfort viewing, but for all its gaudy, kitschtastic period trappings, there’s little nostalgia underpinning it.

Instead, “Misbehaviour” says good riddance to a bad era in the brightest,...