Pity the high-brow drama fan in front of the TV at 9pm last night. Suddenly, as with buses, two came along at once. So was it to be Stephen Poliakoff’s latest film on BBC One – a strange tale about a sweet-natured teenager and a reclusive millionaire; or ITV1’s A Room with a View, adapted by Andrew Davies – Lucy Honeychurch sauced up for the noughties?

Poliakoff’s Friends and Crocodiles and Gideon’s Daughter last year were pretentious attempts at state-of-the-nation storytelling. But Joe’s Palace was beautiful; idiosyncratic, but bewitching rather than self-indulgent. It followed the relationship between Joe (Danny Lee Wynter), a young man who might just have been quiet, but seemed, in olden-day terms, “simple”, and Michael Gambon’s Mr Graham, who wanted to discover the source of his family’s wealth.

Mr Graham kept a large house a few days away from where he actually lived. It was empty bar Joe who acted as its gatekeeper. Joe observed each visitor through a sliding partition. One by one the lead characters unburdened themselves on Joe; their candour and urgency gave the drama its pace. Richard Rees (Rupert Penry-Jones), a Cabinet minister and friend of Mr Graham’s, used the house to have sex with the married Charlotte (Kelly Reilly, in a sequence of sexy slip dresses).

In an odd way, Joe reminded me of George Emerson of A Room with a View; both spoke absolutely plainly. Their honesty and directness – Joe recorded his thoughts in a diary – distinguished them. Rees, for Joe, “always had to stay moving, he was too scared to do anything else”. Mr Graham trusted Joe implicitly because Joe was, literally, true to his word. They ate cold meats together, Joe took some of his heirlooms to be valued on The Antiques Roadshow. London unfolded languidly under Poliakoff’s direction, with occasional surreal flourishes such as a group of ballroom dancers in the park.

Mr Graham’s family secret was finally discovered. His father had done business with the Nazis and in one of the most arresting sequences in a TV drama this year Mr Graham imagined his father, watching Nazi stormtroopers humiliate the Jewish patrons of a Berlin park one sunny morning. The men were forced to crawl naked, while the women were left in the boughs of trees and made to twitter like birds.

Mr Graham was sickened by knowing the origins of the family fortune and Joe bravely stopped him from killing himself. The great, gloomy London house was eventually redecorated. Everyone moved on after one final platter of cold meats. Poliakoff’s camera was always moving – a reference perhaps to Mr Graham’s liking for “phantom rides”; snatches of film shot in transit.

The focus was on the personal, rather – as Poliakoff did in last year’s films – the personal underscored by the political or social. The characters in Joe’s Palace felt like characters, not cyphers, which was more satisfying.

A Room with a View was also beautifully directed by Nicholas Renton, and only gets less space here because – for all its sumptuousness and wonderful acting – acted as a companion to, rather than a radical reinvention of, Merchant-Ivory’s 1980s film. Elaine Cassidy, as Lucy Honeychurch, pounded the piano with scary, repressed passion at key moments; and Andrew Davies chose to state explicitly the homosexuality of the Rev Beebe (Mark Williams) – first by having him solicit sex on the back streets of Florence and then in discussing the similarities between himself and Lucy’s bad-choice-for-husband, Cecil Vyse (a dissolute Laurence Fox).

The biggest change came at the end. Davies didn’t let George (Rafe Spall) and Lucy live happily ever after. A stunning shot saw George dead in the mire of a First World War battlefield and Lucy return to Florence to hook up with the Italian horse-and-carriage driver she had first met years before.

These changes added a melancholic layer to the Forster novel and previous film. It was particularly fun to see Sophie Thompson, with little alteration transposing the bug-eyed twitchiness she bought to spoon-torturing Stella in EastEnders to the clucky aunt Charlotte.

Out of the box

— Mulder and Scully are back. A new X-Files movie is about to begin filming in Vancouver in February reports the movie website IMDB. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson will star, but producers aren’t saying much else – presumably they will still be Mulder and Scully. Well, presumably – but nothing is ever for sure with The X-Files, and as Duchovny’s most recent role in Californication has seen him as a priapic, though shady, writer, maybe Mulder will reemerge no longer as the dour old sourpuss we remember him as, but a sexed-up, hip-wiggling swinger.

— Justice for Hollyoaks. Overlooked at the National TV Awards, James Sutton (John-Paul) and the executive producer Bryan Kirkwood picked up their gong for Broadcast/Broadcaster of the Year at the annual awards by Stonewall, the gay organisation. It was a deserved win: the romance between John-Paul and Craig was by far one of the best-written gay storylines in a soap to date.

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