The Street

BBC One

High noon came at 3.30 on a Sunday afternoon to the Greyhound Pub. The landlord had barred the wimpish son of the local gangster and was refusing to unbar him. The hood announced that he was coming round and wanted his boy served. Much as Hadleyville did in the 1952 Gary Cooper movie, a nameless Manchester suburb held its breath rather than something more useful, such as a weapon...

The only textual clue that Jimmy McGovern had ripped off the plot of High Noon lay in the name of his villain, Tom Miller, as opposed to the film's Frank Miller. But it was the variations McGovern wrought on the myth that made this episode of The Street, returning for its welcome third series, interesting. In the film the agent of law and order was Cooper's marshal. Things were simpler then. Here a publican, Paddy, impeccably played by Bob Hoskins, held back the forces of chaos, regulating the supply of alcohol to the community while upholding the state's diktat when it came to banning smoking, the offence for which Callum Miller was barred. His father Tom, like his cinema namesake, was unable to be brought to justice, but in this case was a responsible local businessman, a financial supporter of the local football team, whose business just happened to be drugs. Liam Cunningham made him almost likeable, which was what made his vicious battering of Paddy, at 3.31pm, all the more unpleasant.

Within such complications lay the script's strength. McGovern interrogated every position. Paddy's pub may have held the community together, but was it not also a drug dealer of sorts? As a recovering alcoholic, Paddy knew the truth of that accusation and also that it was bollocks. Paddy asked the lads of the football team to turn up to support him but had made sure that his own son had left for university. And how much, anyway, was male bravado an attempt to impress his teenage daughters? As for Miller, one saw the impossibility of his position, too. Paddy could make a threat and withdraw it: he would still have his pub. If Miller withdrew his threat, he might as well put up a Going Out of Business sign on his forehead. In the denouement Paddy served the Millers their drinks but added straws and cocktail umbrellas to the son's glass. “You've brought him up like a tart so I am going to serve him like one.” Neither Tom nor Callum had an answer to that. The final scene saw Tom expel his family from his home but by then Paddy had also expelled his regulars. The community was broken anyway.

The Street, like Clocking Off before it, has a near perfect format, likely to appease both critics and channel controllers by being a series of one-off plays that looks like a series. Its only drawback is that its premise is almost always gloomy and you need to force yourself through the first dour 10 minutes. I have never watched an episode yet, however, that did not deliver rich rewards.

Monday Monday

ITV1

The rewards likely to be delivered by Monday Monday will be rather less: a few smiles, perhaps mild curiosity about who will cop off with whom and the pleasure of seeing Fay Ripley playing a drunk. This new comedy drama is set in the human resources department of a supermarket company that, for no discernable reason, commercial or dramatic, has relocated to Leeds. Episode one began with the very old device of a girl who has a one-night stand with a bloke who turns out to be her colleague and continued with the similarly venerable plot-starter of introducing a new ball-breaker boss to the team. The script bravely lunged towards bad taste with a line about a sick colleague's “Kajagoogoo cancer”, so named because she was as unlikely as the band to make a comeback.

Sky Arts Theatre Live!

Sky Arts 1

It was unfortunate that the This Life producer Tony Garnett accused the BBC of producing “junk food drama” the day it brought back The Street and ITV responded with Monday Monday, but he still had a point when he wrote that “there are very few single pieces or mini-series, the kind of original writers' work where a voice can communicate directly with an audience.” I have hopes that Sky Arts Theatre Live!, which launched withthe first of five one-off plays last week, will shame the BBC into doing more. For me, Jackie Kay's Mind Away, about an Alzheimic woman whose daughter spins a fantasy about where her mother's mind has gone, did not quite work and certainly not as television. It was not helped by the sycophantic laughter of a studio audience. But the experiment is brave and the play was ambitious. If permitting artistic failure is a rule by which Sky Arts is now willing to play, then it deserves a standing ovation.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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