My Zinc Bed (BBC Two)

If Jonathan Pryce ever invites you to lunch, refuse. Do not look into his eyes. Do not accept a glass of wine. It will be hard: his eyes are glittering, his seduction technique ruthless – with a killer smile, he will make you do whatever he wants you to do. In David Hare’s My Zinc Bed he played the cuckold who, even as he was being cuckolded (supposedly in total ignorance, although you were never quite sure), seemed to be in control of events.

My Zinc Bed was so slated before transmission that your expectations may have been low. But in his brilliant polemic for this paper – well I would say that, you might say – Hare made clear the values he held dear about the one-off made-for-television play, and My Zinc Bed more than met those values. It was difficult, but also original and powerful.

Nothing much happens, critics have wailed. People don’t really speak like that. This is probably true, but the otherworld-liness of it – the slightly unreal characters, the stagy way they spoke – recalled other “difficult” TV drama, Stephen Poliakoff for example, where you have to give yourself over to it (or huff, puff and turn over to Top Gear). A doesn’t necessarily lead to B, there isn’t an explosion or confrontation every five minutes, the characters are hard, the dialogue demanding.

My Zinc Bed made you realise how spoonfed we are in prime-time these days, how most drama comes from a conveyor belt; how unusual it is to find a drama moving at an unpredictable pace, with little action and lots of words. It reminded you that, as with stage, the best plays make you work, watch and listen hard.

Shane Meadows’s muse Paddy Considine played Paul, a journalist and recovering drunk, who was sent to interview Pryce’s Victor Quinn, a company CEO, master of all he surveyed. Quinn knew Paul’s poetry (which had never made him famous) and teased him about not drinking. Their encounter was edgy – the roles of interviewer and interviewee were reversed and Paul was forced to talk about his alcoholism. Victor was the cat, Paul was the mouse being played with. The music and tone were threatening: Victor offered Paul a job with his company, smartening up the prose on its website.

Uma Thurman played the femme fatale, Victor’s wife Elsa, herself a former addict. Without naming her, Victor had first told Paul she had given up AA because she found it more abusive and controlling than her addiction. After a skittish discussion about fidelity, she and Paul started having sex and he started drinking again – after being goaded by her that sobriety meant he was cutting himself off from feeling. Thurman was difficult to hear: her foreign accent only one notch above a whisper. Pryce carried on menacing from the margins, musing about the young men “with their stiff little c**ks” and the women who “longed for adventure” in his office.

The story meandered around addiction, love, desire and responsibility. No great answer was alighted upon, or decisive end reached. Depending on your patience and tastes, this could have left you slightly frustrated and shortchanged, or tantalised. The events of “that summer”, which Considine had alluded to in his initial narration, were quiet yet also seismic. Quinn died in a car crash (three times over the limit: a neat twist). Paul dried out again, and became a quite famous poet, but he thought that Quinn and Elsa may have been right: to be cured of his addiction meant he was cured of his desire. Which led to the unspoken thought that desire was alluring, and core to our beings, but also deadly. The zinc bed of the title was the mortuary slab we will all eventually occupy.

Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One)

Mortality was also at the heart of Jerry Springer’s Who Do You Think You Are? Springer’s family was Jewish and from Germany, escaping just before the “gates” were closed to the UK, where Springer was born. His mother’s passport had the stamp, “Refugee from Nazi oppression”. In a moving hour, Springer faced what was a gruelling and upsetting story of the Holocaust made personal.

He discovered first that his great-great grandfather had stood up against antiSemitism in the 1880s. Then his attention moved to the fate of Selma, his father’s mother and Marie, his mother’s mother, under the Nazis. The research on this show is so good: the stories of both the women followed their time in Jewish ghettoes to their deaths – one in a gas van, a precursor to the gas chamber; the other at a hospital in the ghetto, Springer grateful that one at least had been spared a horrible murder.

At the end Springer met a second cousin from Israel. It was moving because death, and especially the death on a grand scale meted out by the Nazis, nullifies life. But Springer said the discovery of a new branch of his family made him realise that “the basic lesson of all this is, ‘Hold on to your family’ ”. He concluded: “Who do I think I am? A link in the chain of a wonderful family. I’m blessed.”

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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