Do you ever wonder why banks subsidise exhibitions of 17th-century Italian bookbinding or tours of Romanian contemporary dance festivals or baroque liturgical music played on original crumhorns? If you ask them, they will tell you it's subtle profile-raising, or corporate entertainment, or simply putting something back. It’s not really any of those things. They are just the envelope that the truth comes in. Really, banks support the arts because it makes them feel cultivated, sophisticated and worthwhile.

Stephen Poliakoff is the BBC’s leather-bound song and dance with original crum-horn, its little feelgood tablet. Tristrams spend their days commissioning programmes they couldn’t bear to watch themselves, pandering to talent that beggars the word on behalf of an audience that they at best pity and at worst despise. They need something to make them feel their lives are worthwhile and to boast about at the club. Poliakoff consoles them with the knowledge that they produce something culturally worthwhile: not some overdressed, overacted, sentimental 19th-century book fillet, but a piece of contemporary drama, written for the box by a real playwright with a beard. They throw eyewatering amounts of money at his plays to cushion their cultural embarrassment and to get awards from other Tristrams. Whether the audience likes it or not is neither here nor there.

Poliakoff is the great practitioner of telly for people who don’t like telly. It used to be Dennis Potter – the Tristrams would make any old bit of dribbly nonsense he pulled out of his underpants. Poliakoff had not one but two big cultural goes on your box last week. Joe’s Palace (Sunday, BBC1) was a long story about, well, nothing very much except an empty house. Watching it felt like eating unsweetened tapioca for an hour and occasionally finding a mouse dropping. It had all the predictable Poliakoff themes that make him so popular with so few: a vague sense of disconnection, a hint of impending revelation, a suggestion of the past infecting the present, a miasma of sadness and loss, the merest waft of class. Poliakoff’s genre can be summed up as a collection of farts and burps signifying something that didn’t agree with him at breakfast. There is a disengagement in his writing that both renders his characters impervious to empathy and uncouples their connection with the audience. Our introduction to the author is never more than the formal “good day” of the credits. What he does get, though, is movie-sized productions and fabulous casts. Michael Gambon made a complex and compellingly tense character out of a script that, for most of the time, was as bland as it was dull.

Poliakoff has a tea-strainer of an ear for dialogue, managing to retain what you want to spit out while losing what you want to drink in. I can only imagine that actors see his scripts as a sort of thespian commando course: horrid, but good for you. There was the pretty boy from Spooks, who, I’m pleased to say, can smile, and a girl with breasts that should be nominated for Baftas, singularly or as a pair. Joe’s Palace was as empty as the empty house. Its denouement involved the surprise of Nazis in the woodshed, a final solution that is the lazy, strap-on device of shock and horror for a playwright apparently too uncommitted to his characters or audience to manufacture something himself. I can confidently say that, written by anyone else, Joe’s Palace would never have got past the commissioning editor’s secretary.

Poliakoff’s A Real Summer (Saturday, BBC2) was slighter but rather better, a monologue with interruptions. It was a thin skein of beige writing, but delivered by Ruth Wilson, who is as beguiling and intelligent an actress as you’ll find on the small screen or stage at the moment. She could make a Panasonic instruction manual compelling, and was at least watch-able while going through this rather daft and unbelievable story of class. Somewhere in a drawer or a box in the garage, Poliakoff probably has the beginnings of a script that would be worth both making and watching. But he has been bought and spoilt by the uncritical subsidy of a handful of culturally insecure commissioning editors, so why should he bother?

It was a week of big drama. All summer, there is not much more than The Bill and Americana to keep the flame of acting burning, then, all of a sudden, they’re braying in your DVR like a green room full of actor-managers. Why would anyone want to remake A Room with a View (Sunday, ITV1)? It’s the story of every sort of arch snobbery, intellectual, social, emotional, sexual; of the trite and embarrassing melodramatic incapacity of a lot of silly, idle people to do something as simple as go on holiday and snog a boyfriend. The characters are alternately elevated on plinths of their own smugness or wallowing in pits of their own sexual gaucherie. It is the most emotionally dishonest book – maybe not dishonest, probably just ignorant – written by a man who had not the slightest idea how teenage girls feel, either inside or outside. The Edwardian writers of Bloomsbury thought of little else but sex, and you can’t believe that any of them ever had a shag that was worth sharing.

This is a minor, brittle little piece of Edwardian prudery, pretending to be brave and enlightened. It has no relevance or resonance today, other than as a historical observation: not socially, not culturally and certainly not sexually. It’s one of those books that makes you yearn for the machineguns of the western front. A good cast – Elaine Cassidy, Laurence Fox, Timothy Spall and his son Rafe – made the best of a production that suffered in comparison with the lush Merchant Ivory film. The view from the fateful window might have been the Manchester Ship Canal.

The Street (Thursday, BBC1) was one of my favourite strands of last year, and it’s back with a new series of interlocking stories. The first one, oddly, had the plot of an Ealing comedy as if remade by Ken Loach. An identical twin swaps places with his better-off, heroic but dead bachelor brother. Stories that revolve around the mistaken twin should really be left to Shakespeare. This one was smartly and tautly written, and played and directed with an intense, credible misery. It almost managed to banish disbelief. The moral was that money isn’t the answer to everything. This is the authorised version of morality, always handed out to indebted, overworked, worried-sick folk. But there’s little that’s moral about poverty, and the comforting message at the end was that money may not be absolutely everything – it may not even be the most important thing – but, like petrol to cars, nothing goes anywhere without it. Although the premise of this story and its Victorian moral were less than perfect, it was the best bit of telly drama of the week, mainly because it cared enough about its audience actually to be a bit dramatic.

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