Dominic Cooper and Sarah Harding BBC

Money – not just the route of all evil, but rubbish in close-up.

How, exactly, do you film the credit crunch? That’s the question lots of TV bods are scratching their chins about right now. The indecisive hand of someone choosing between normal and Tesco Value porridge? Falling computer numbers as reflected on a perspiring banker’s glasses (someone will do this)? A credit card in a vice?

No doubt about it, we’ve got some pretty bad crunch-o-tainment coming.

Thankfully, one of the first, tonight’s feature-length ­"Freefall" from Dominic Savage, isn’t one of them.

Which isn’t to say that, at its heart, it’s not an average drama. It is. It’s just an average drama done very well, with some terrific performances from a fine cast. Put another way, the script can be a bit broad.

First we have a cockney, cocky mortgage seller called (can you guess?) Dave. Dave (a great Dominic Cooper) is a little s**t incarnate – immensely punchable, swaggering his way through life, cheating on Sarah Harding (who’s fine in a screechy cameo performance way), and selling mortgages to people who own just a matchbox and some lint.

In other words, exactly what a baying, chub-fisted audience member of "The Jeremy Kyle Show" would expect him to be.

In fact, everyone in the ­ensemble cast, ostensibly showing the credit crunch from all sides, seems to be what a baying chub-fisted ­audience member of "The Jeremy Kyle Show" would expect them to be. Take Aidan Gillen’s big-city financier, who divides his time neatly between walking quickly through places where everything is glass; saying “it’s good, but it’s never enough, I want more”; ignoring his young daughter; and furiously masturbating in the toilets after sealing a deal. He’s like an evil tombola.

Yet Gillen, who played Tommy Carcetti in "The Wire", somehow makes it work despite the on-the-nose script. It’s in the glazed stares, the close-up at breaking point where he does everything with a twitch. Put another way, Gillen is a fine actor. In fact, they all do a good job, even Rosamund Pike, whose only role is doing it on a desk.

But best is easily the grassroots strand of Joseph Mawle and Anna Maxwell Martin, a poor couple living in a rented council flat who are sold a mortgage by (guess who) old school friend Dave The S**t.

Again, perhaps there’s something a bit too obvious about it all, but by the time they go through their ordeal, when the all-too-familiar calls come through from the mortgage company in their oh-so-understanding tones, you feel their gut punch of despair, of being cheated and worse, or being fooled for nothing more than wanting better for their kids.

Perhaps that’s why it works. For those at the top, they were punished for greed; for those at the bottom, they were ­punished for hope.