Bob Hoskins as Paddy Gargan and Frances Barber as Lizzie Gargan BBC

The Street

BBC One, 9pm

Here’s a set-up that sounds boring enough to send you down your local for a pint: a drama about someone not getting served a pint in their local. Oooh, the thrill! What will he order, a bitter or a lager? What’s that, both? Christ, things are really ­hotting up. And he’s not being served! Look, a landlord not pulling the lever! Crikey. If someone eats a pork scratching, I might pass out.

But here’s the remarkable thing: it’s the return of the Bafta-winning The Street, the landlord in question is the ever-watchable Bob Hoskins, and the writer is the utterly brilliant Jimmy McGovern, a man who could make a tense three-act drama from someone picking up a penny, only to realise it was a stone and put it back down again.

At its heart, tonight’s ­episode is a simple morality tale (the set-up of The Street, for you newbies, focuses on the high drama of low-key lives on a single Manchester street). Tom (Liam Cunningham) is a local gangster. His timid son (Robert Emms) has been barred from the local boozer by ­landlord Paddy (Hoskins) for smoking in the loos. And does Tom not like that?

There really is no one better than McGovern at writing what should essentially be trivial kitchen-sink fare and building it up to the level of unbearable dramatic tension. Put another way: he’s one of the few writers who can ­remind us that no one is a supporting player in their own lives.

So, as Tom threatens to “break every bone” in Paddy’s body if they’re not served when they return the next day, we’re left with an increasingly desperate landlord struggling with what to do.

"Jimmy McGovern - a man who could make a tense three-act drama from someone picking up a penny"

Can he really let them back in, when he’s banned another kid for the same thing? He has one idea: un-bar that kid. ­Unexpectedly, the kid refuses the offer. He accepts being barred. It’s what makes it a good pub, he says. “But – would you stand up to him?” asks Hoskins.

“No.”

“Then why do you expect me to?”

“Just do – some people you expect things of.”

Pause. “You’re barred,” he decides. They both smile.

It’s scenes like this that make McGovern great. Not schmaltzy or overdone; a conversation that goes in a ­direction you don’t expect, yet never feels anything but honest. And something else too: a quiet humanity, a gentle nudge that while “doing the right thing” may be a complex and ever-shifting thing, it’s no less trivial just because the situation is.

Needless to say, it doesn’t quite end up as you’d expect – McGovern has always been a fearless writer, never willing to sacrifice realism for neatness, but there’s something so satisfying in that rarity. Put another way: it feels true.