Professor Howard Florey (Dominic West) and his team BBC

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Breaking the Mould: The Story of Penicillin

BBC Four, 9pm

MUST be tough being an actor. You finally find a role that suits you perfectly, a series that works, dialogue that makes sense, and a devoted fanbase. Brilliant. What could possibly go wrong? Success, that’s what. It’ll screw you every time.

Take poor Dominic West, formerly a hard-drinking cop in hard-hitting series The Wire, now playing Australian chemist Professor Howard Florey in tonight’s drama on the story of penicillin.

It’s nuanced, slow-burning and engrossing in a “it’s BBC Four and people stare at test tubes a lot” kind of way, and all about how the small team who made penicillin work were just as crucial in saving millions of lives as the man who discovered it, Alexander Fleming. And West is great. But do you pay attention to any of that? No. You just sit there, thinking: “Isn’t it weird seeing Jimmy McNulty in a lab coat?”

Well, it’s awful to admit, but yes. For the first 10 minutes you can’t help shouting things like: “Don’t ask him for the lab results Jimmy! Take him into the back and beat those pH levels out of him! Get Bunk to help you out!”

After that, it helps that he’s served by a decent script, a genteel drama that couldn’t be further away from the world of The Wire if it tried, and a natural Eton-boy accent that he’s given free reign to slip back into.

And unless you’re one of the 12 people who remembers the details from school (and I’m sure even at school they just told us it was all down to Fleming so as not to confuse us), it’s actually quite educational. Among the things you learn are:

1. Alexander Fleming was lazy. He discovered penicillin, but only figured out how to make enough to save a ladybird with a graze, and never tested it on a living organism. It was as if he’d invented cheese, presented the world with a Dairylea slice, and told everyone not to eat it.

2. Alexander Fleming was an a***hole. Professor Florey and his team – including Ernst Chain (Oliver Dimsdale) and Norman Heatley (Joe ­Armstrong) – did all the hard work by figuring out how to produce and administer ­penicillin (enlisting a bronze letter box for the latter ­purpose). Yet it was Fleming, the git, who hogged the credit.

3. Alexander Fleming was a smug, selfish sod. Generally.

All in all, the drama doesn’t work out too well for Fleming, but much better for ­Florey, the Florence Nightingale of the story. Florey was desperate to push the medicine through in ­order to help our boys during wartime, and screw over ­Hitler with ­nothing more than a well-pressed lab coat, a lot of ­determination, looking really closely at stuff, and a few odds and ends he found around the lab.

Great specs, too.