Heaven knows they’re miserable now | 1 June 2017

On the face of it, the two new big drama series of the week don’t have a great deal in common, with one set in a determinedly present-day Britain, the other in a dystopian American future. What they do share, though, is a general air of classiness, some impressively understated central performances and, above all, an almost heroic commitment to unrelenting misery.

In the first episode of Broken (BBC1, Tuesday), a typical scene consisted of single mother Christina — who’d just been sacked from her badly paid job and told she was ineligible for benefits — reluctantly selling off her wedding and engagement rings, before returning home to find her mother dead. The Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4, Sunday) began with the heroine’s husband being shot and her young daughter taken from her by men with machine guns. In most shows, this might have meant that she called the police. In this one, unfortunately, those men were the police.

Broken is the latest drama by Jimmy McGovern (Cracker, The Street) — which could well be why it’s attracted two such starry leads. Neither of them, mind you, is required to demonstrate much starriness here. Sean Bean abandons his normal hunky ways to play a quietly spoken priest who manages to radiate goodness wherever he goes, despite obviously having Issues of His Own. Anna Friel does the traditional glamorous-actress-trying-hard-to-look-dowdy thing — rather well, in fact — as Christina, a woman whose bad luck is by no means limited to being a penniless orphan.

Not content with sacking her, for example, her female boss also beat her up so effectively that Christina spent most of Tuesday’s programme with both a black eye and a fat lip. At one point, she did briefly achieve something resembling contentment as she tested her children’s maths over breakfast — but then scalded herself with boiling water.