Television - The feel-good age meets retribution in a slick new soap, writes Andrew Billen The Street (BBC1)

We have been living through a period when our major television dramas are frequently cast from soaps. It sometimes works - Mia Farrow and Ryan O'Neal, for instance, started their careers on Peyton Place in the early 1960s - and sometimes (Ross Kemp's years at ITV spring to mind) it doesn't. If only, I used to think, it worked the other way round and great actors appear-ed in soap operas. Then came Ian McKellen's stint on Coronation Street, lending a bizarre, Stella Street edge to its comedy.

Now there is The Street (Thursdays, 9pm), written by Jimmy Mc- Govern, who laboured for many years on Brookside before creating Cracker, The Lakes, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot and the harrowing drama-documentaries Hillsborough and Sunday. It has a cast to die for. Jane Horrocks, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall and Sue Johnston make The Street the Imperial Leather of soaps. Although each episode, as with Paul Abbott's Clocking Off, is complete in itself, it otherwise obeys the unities of TV soap opera: realism, a regular cast and a fixed location somewhere among the working classes.

My first impression of the opening episode was how pastel everything was. This is a northern proletariat that has moved on from both postwar greyness and hideous kitsch. There is not one interior a member of the bourgeoisie might pity or sneer at. We may not yet be one nation, but at least we work from the same Dulux colour chart.

Even the hospital scenes are painted in modern hues, and a child's respirator is nursery blue. Against this Mothercare-coloured backdrop, the actors emote like mad in full Technicolor.

My second thought was that this was a kitchen-sink drama. It opens with a long-married couple, Angela (Horrocks) and her builder husband Arthur (Daniel Ryan), having an almighty row in the kitchen as he leaves for work. The next scene sees a pipe burst under the sink. Angela rushes out of the house and catches her neighbour Peter (Shaun Dooley) as he is about to drive off to work (he is a sweet salesman). A knight in shining Gap suit, he plugs the hole. Sodden, the two fall into passionate lovemaking, rounded off with a chocolate éclair, a watery experience so enjoyable they repeat it daily for the next week.

Both Angela and Peter, however, attend to their conjugal responsibilities come Saturday night. The burst pipe is clearly symbolic of pent-up tension, marital and sexual, but there is no suggestion, at this stage, that theirs is going to be a marriage-breaking affair.

Then, 12 minutes in, something shocking happens. Peter, daydreaming about Angela and trying to spot her through the window, runs down her daughter Katy as she crosses the street. Dooley's expression becomes hangdog, but, as his won-derfully well-thought-out performance makes clear, shaggy-haired, shagged-out Peter is one level short of terminal despair. When push comes to shove he will save himself, his job and his family income and testify in court that he was driving with due care.

Angela, Horrocks in yet another outstanding performance, becomes as incontinent as her plumbing, hosing both her lover and husband with vitriol and taking on God, too: "What kind of sick, twisted God is it who would punish me by tak- ing my child?"

It is a McGovern speciality to give voice to inarticulate male grief, and he does so again here with Arthur's. He is transformed before our eyes from a vest- wearing no-good to a figure of tragic stature and righteousness, ticking off the local scally for not paying the taxes that keep little girls alive in hospitals.

Arthur punches Peter out - which only brings him closer to his wife. He kicks at the cars in the street - he does not own one himself. He tacitly encourages his son to beat up Peter's at school. In a crazy attempt to make things right, he cements bollards at the end of the street to turn it into a cul-de-sac (geographic and emotional).

Given this intensity of acting from Ryan, it was hardly necessary for McGovern to make him tell his wife: "I'm just some hairy-arsed builder. I haven't the gift of the gab. Can't put into words how I feel, but that doesn't mean I don't love you, you and the kids." In the end, the court lets Peter off and Angela is forced to mete out the punishment instead, both on herself and on Peter. She announces to their other halves that they "shagged". The final scene shows Peter mov-ing out, his belongings, like his life, in rubbish sacks.

Some will think this an old-fashioned drama in comparison to Clocking Off and Shameless, and it certainly has the virtues of a well-made play or short story from yesteryear. But by addressing the choices open to us in the moral free-for-all that can exist in what Abbott might call a shameless culture, McGovern is driving at something important.

At one point Peter says he would kill himself if he thought it would do any good (that is, make Katy well; in fact, she lives anyway). "Do it then," says Angela. "It would do a lot of good. It would make me feel better." Here the feel-good age meets eye-for-an-eye retribution. Maybe our daily soaps need not so much actors of this calibre but writers of McGovern's.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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