Television - Andrew Billen is bewildered by the changes in working-class drama

The disappointing first outing of Clocking Off (Sundays, 9pm, BBC1) poses the question of whether a boom dooms working-class drama. To put it another way: remove the grit from beneath the blue collars and is there anything left for pearls to grow around? No one expects life under Blair to be as grim as Boys from the Blackstuff or as earthy as Auf Wiedersehen Pet, but Clocking Off is somehow too glossy and stylish for a series of stories about a northern textile factory, let alone one from Paul Abbott's pen, an instrument not known for pumping varnish.

Admittedly, it's harsh judging any six-part drama from its initial outing. Elements of the first episode suggested that Abbott was using it to introduce us to his ensemble. The plot centred on a lorry driver, Stuart Leach, returning to his family after a 13-month absence. Because he claimed to be suffering amnesia, introductions were conveniently necessary. (Soaps usually begin with this kind of device: the new corner-shop owner arriving at Coronation Street; the new doctor driving into Peyton Place.)

On the other hand, since each episode of Clocking Off is self-contained and features characters with only minimally recurring roles, the first episode was intended to function as a dramatic entity in its own right - but it was not a particularly distinguished one. Memory loss is one unlikely and over-familiar plot line; bigamy, which was this story's resolution, is another. The confrontations with both of Stuart's wives, the bookends of the story, were well written: in the first instance, Stuart was ignored as if he were a ghost; in the second, his wife carried on a monologue about their plans for the weekend. But the plot in between was about as satisfying as an episode of The Bill.

Abbott, who wrote episodes of Cracker and last summer's excellent Pete Postlethwaite thriller, Butterfly Collectors, is not afraid of taking his characters to the point of violence, but here nobody's anguish looked very dangerous. The acting, which will surely improve next week when Christopher Eccleston and Sarah Lancashire take centre stage, was familiar in a lugubrious sort of way and not helped by the physical and temperamental similarities between the three Leach boys, Stuart (John Simm) and his brothers (Jason Merrells and Jack Deam). I found it hard to differentiate between them - but I may be reaching the time of life when all young men begin to look the same.

What was diverting was the affluence of the working-class life portrayed in Clocking Off. Stuart and Sue Leach live in a model home and have mortgage worries. They dress permanently as if for a private gym - in pristine T-shirts. They exchange gifts of gift-wrapped Thorntons chocolates. In the works canteen, pasta carbonara is served. When someone asks for it, they are told "the Branston's on the shelf". Only the club they all drink at would be recognisable to the wheeltappers and shunters of the 1970s.

In the factory itself, the 200 extras Abbott demanded as his ransom when he took the series to the BBC from Granada, where he was under contract, do not look oppressed or over-worked. The factory boss sits with his workers in the club at night. His workers park their cars in his car park. Even the lorries the men drive, with their designer logos, look an evolutionary leap away from the freight transported by the men who worked for The Brothers in the 1970s. This does not look like a workforce about to do anything else that will threaten its standard of living. I hope Abbott can make something of the milieu, but it will take a better plot than a two-timing lorry driver doing a bunk. At the moment, the complacency of the environment is working against Abbott's talent for stripping away until he finds raw emotion.

Mind you, as an evocation of working-class culture, Clocking Off is a work of brave authenticity next to Sunburn (Saturdays, 8.55pm, BBC1). For this second season, the holiday reps, led by Michelle Collins and the horribly wasted George Layton, have moved from Cyprus to the Algarve. What remained of their sun-addled brains has clearly been lost in transit. The fall guys in the first episode were the new rep, the naive Lee (Sean Maguire doing a Lee Evans impression) who, predictably, lost his trunks in unromantic circumstances, and Layton's wimpish character, Alan, who got kidnapped by the "Workers Revolutionary Army", a gang so stupid that when they tried to cut off Alan's finger they removed one of their own. The love interest was between a moronic football player and Collins's Nicki, who likes to pretend that she is brighter than she looks but, given her choice of bedmates, surely can't be.

The premise of this comedy-drama is that, on holi-day, everyone is allowed to be a little thick and is all the more likeable for it. Mike Bullen, who on his brighter days writes Cold Feet, must hope that his audiences, all these months away from summer, are thicker. They will have to be to put up with this witless, xenophobic, would-be feel-good nonsense. The BBC still makes better prestige drama than any other, but under Mal Young, and with the exception of Jonathan Creek, its drama series remain very unattractive viewing.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"

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