Television - Andrew Billen enjoys a drama revealing the depressed poet's mischievous side

Until the details of Philip Larkin's life came spilling out from Andrew Motion's biography, most of us had supposed the Bard of Hull's sexual modus operandi to be one of angry but largely self-imposed chastity. In Love Again (26 July, BBC2), Susanna White's quite wonderful dramatisation of his love life, the fictionalised Larkin admits that it much more nearly resembled a French farce. A beautifully written scene at his hospital bedside towards the end has his two long-term lovers, Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan, saying farewell to him while his secretary, Betty Mackereth, with whom he has also started sleeping, turns up with "papers for him to sign". Life, which for him equalled women, is crowding in on him just as death does.

Death and depression may have been Larkin's great subjects, but Richard Cottan's economic screenplay suggests that love and "why it never worked for me" was a third. The film's title is taken (as is that quotation) from his 1979 poem "Love Again", the one that begins: "Love again: wanking at ten past three/(Surely he's taken her home by now?) . . ." White's drama tells us who that "her" was.

It was Maeve, assistant at his library in Hull, making a tentative bid for freedom after a relationship already almost two decades long in which she, as a Catholic, at first denied him sex and Larkin, when she relented, denied her commitment. Maeve Brennan died in June but apparently approved of this drama. Interviewed on Channel 4's documentary about Larkin, Love and Death in Hull, she seemed sharper and less mousy than Amanda Root's portrayal, but it is still a gem. Highlighting what Larkin apparently liked about her - that she was "rather ordinary, really" - Root strokes the fitted furniture of his new kitchen and offers to make a second pot of tea at his mother's house. She would be so content with the conventional comforts her boyfriend despises.

She is certainly more Mrs Larkin's cup of char than her rival, the academic Monica, who represents the kind of flashiness his mother fears. Eva Larkin (played with baleful, passive aggression by Eileen Atkins) boasts that she, unlike Monica, could never go blonde because she doesn't "have the personality" - and places a proprietorial coaster under Monica's saucer.

As Monica, Tara Fitzgerald here begins her transition from a fetching romantic lead to surely one of our finest character actors. She is bright, tetchy, fun and furious, sometimes all at once. When Larkin admits his unconsummated relationship with Maeve, she barks: "You stupid, stupid man," and bursts into cruel laughter. Then, spinning on a sixpence, she warns him not to touch her.

Women are Larkin's weakness, not because of his liking for them, but their unfathomable liking for this bald, self-centred, ham-fisted man. There is a farcical side to this. Confronted by too many women in his office, he faints, knocking on his way down the door of a cupboard, from which spews his private library of Parade magazines, his fourth mistress.

He did not behave well to Monica or Maeve (Betty did not care). "We are fine as we are," he tells Monica. "No, you are fine as we are," she spits back. Still, they must have known that his fear of commitment, based on Cyril Connolly's premise that the pram in the hall was the enemy of good art, would not be lightly shed. Significantly, when Monica and he finally end up living together, his muse flees and the pair descend into drink (although you have to be alert, or to have seen the more scurrilous Channel 4 film, to notice that they are drinking sherry at breakfast). Larkin does not emerge as the villain of this piece mainly because his poems, which he chose over life, are never far from the screen, and the poems excuse a lot.

They are read beautifully by Hugh Bonneville in the BBC radio studio that becomes one of the play's framing devices. In this chamber, he fusses about extraneous noises infiltrating the tape, a metaphor for his resentment at life contaminating his vocation. Gradually, as he becomes deafer, the noises become less, but so does his work tail off. In the play's only questionable joke, at his last sitting he farts, causing the engineer to ask if he heard anything.

The other structural pivots are the hospital beds occupied by Larkin, his mother and a shingly Monica. Death with its mundane trappings is thus kept at the front of our minds, as, undoubtedly, it was in Larkin's. Yet Love Again is unexpectedly light. When the script veers off toward fantasy, with the young Queen reciting "They fuck you up, your mum and dad . . ." during her Christmas broadcast, it feels as if we have gained access to Larkin's mischievousness as well as Cottan's.

The still young Hugh Bonneville enjoys his finest hour as Larkin, catching his subject's self-regard, his self-mockery and his warmth, as well as his more obvious traits of despair and rage. Having played another bald academic - the young John Bayley, in Richard Eyre's Iris - it has been suggested that Bonneville drew on Jim Broadbent's portrayal of the older Bayley. But Broadbent as Bayley was Clive Dunn in comparison with Bonneville's sensitive interpretation of Larkin. He is a better actor than Broadbent and Love Again, although it is White's first serious drama and she made it on a shoestring, is the better film.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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