Television - Andrew Billen hails BBC3's revival of that forgotten TV art form, the single play

There are no plays on television now, only films. If you repeated an ITV Armchair Theatre now, audiences would quickly feel the claustrophobia of the few sets, find the pace worryingly slow and complain of the wordiness of the dialogue. So at least goes conventional wisdom. The Danish "Dogma 95" school of film-making challenged this thinking. By using rubbishy hand-held video cameras, Dogma directors took the emphasis away from how a film looked to what it was looking at. Paradoxically, the results were sometimes spectacular.

The best of the Dogma films was Thomas Vinterberg's Festen, about a family party held for a patriarch's 60th birthday that sours when the father's long-suppressed abuse of his children is uncovered. Vinterberg ruthlessly follows the party through every stage of embarrassment. Festen, it is said, inspired Morwenna Banks to make The Announcement, a small-budget film, shot on hand-held video, which received its TV premiere on BBC3 on 24 June. It opened with Toby Stephens smashing up his television. Were I to read too much into it, I would call it a metaphor for what Banks was trying to do to the current state of TV drama.

In fact, the film was modest in its ambitions. Banks got a group of like-minded actors (David Baddiel is her boyfriend) to act out a tale of thirtysomething angst around her kitchen table - literally her table, because it was shot at her home in Greenwich, south-east London. If you are trying to break new ground, you do not write a play about middle-class Londoners having commitment problems. The mind winds back to Kenneth Branagh's Peter's Friends in 1992, which most people not undeservedly renamed Ken's Friends.

The Announcement starred the next generation of thesps - Stephens, Tom Hollander, Lennie James, Kate Hardie - and it was easier to believe their characters had jobs in show business than whatever their jobs were supposed to be. But even that did not matter because, within a few minutes, you cared enough to accept that luvvies get broken hearts, too. As her premise, Banks, who wrote, produced and starred, came up with the perception that you do not have to wait until you are 60 to have accumulated enough secrets and lies among your set for the whole thing to have become thoroughly unhealthy.

This lot, it is obvious from the first course of their dinner party, know far too much about one another. Not only has there been the usual swapping of partners, but the boys have the uncharming habit of sharing porn films between them. The conversation, fuelled by cheap bubbly and cocaine, conducted behind billows of cigarette smoke, is wearily sexual. Banks does not make the mistake of pretending we are eavesdropping at the Algonquin. The jokes ("Not the old porn debate?" "No, let's have a masturbate") are puerile. When it comes to discussing a husband's preference for anal sex, they are not even really jokes.

Such brutally intimate conversation is the unfortunate curtain-raiser to the announcement of the play's title. The hosts, Ross (Stephens) and Beth (Banks), announce that they have just got married. The news goes down badly all round.

Richard (the excellent Lennie James, as controlled as he was unhinged in the recent Buried) and his wife Helen (Kate Hardie, her lips as soft and spongy as her tongue is sharp) are going through the early days of baby-hell with their twins and are off marriage per se. Ben (Tom Hollander) is still in love with Beth. Alex (Fay Ripley) was stood up at the altar on her wedding day. Liv and Nikki (Aisling O'Sullivan and Miranda Pleasence) are lesbians. Debbie (Joanna Scanlon) and Frank (Gordon Kennedy) have decided not to get married because "why spoil a nice clean split with a messy divorce"?

The main reason everyone is angry, however, is that they all know that Ross, although obsessed by sex, no longer has sex with Beth. The dishonesty of the announcement encourages everyone to view their own lives with clarity, and it is not a pretty aspect. By the end of a very long evening, Beth has caught Ross having a blow job from the Scandinavian girlfriend (Heike Makatsch, nod to Dogma) of the foul-mouthed Dougie (Baddiel). Ben has run off after Beth. Richard and Helen have decided to get divorced and Helen has choked on her own vomit. As in Festen, a celebration has turned into a gory, compulsive, funny train wreck.

Only in the final 20 minutes does Banks's nerve break. Having spent perhaps too long in comedy (she is a veteran of Channel 4's Absolutely), she goes for the redemptive finish. Beth and Ross have not got married after all, but Frank and Debbie decide to. Richard and Helen fall back in love. The two singletons, Alex and Andy (Mark Addy in a "special needs" haircut), have got it together. The lesbians perform a private wedding ceremony before their bedroom mirror.

The final credits roll against a scene of misjudged sentimentality, as Beth and Ben marry alfresco, she in fairy wings, he in a cowboy outfit. Instead of pushing us into Mike Leigh territory, Banks gives us Cold Feet. But for 60 of its 80 minutes, The Announcement was enjoyable, acute and brilliantly acted. That BBC3, of all channels, should end up reviving the single play makes us forgive it a lot (eg, This is Dom Joly, Liquid News, Celebdaq . . .).

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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