Poliakoff’s still got the plot – but he’s lost everything else

Close to the Enemy Thursday, BBC Two

Damilola, Our Loved Boy Monday, BBC One

Black & British: a Forgotten History Wednesday, BBC Two

f you didn’t watch the first episode of

Stephen Poliakoff’s new post-war thriller, you really should. Not on account of it being magnificent, but because it’s one of the battiest things I’ve seen in ages.

Maybe give it five minutes on iPlayer. That’s all you’ll need to get a flavour and then you can go and take a nice long bath and wonder if that really just happened.

Set in the aftermath of the Second World War, Close to the Enemy told the story of a British intelligence officer named Callum Ferguson (Jim Sturgess) who had been given one last mission before he was demobbed. His task was to persuade a captured German rocket scientist named Dieter Koehler (August Diehl) to work for the British, as opposed to the Russians or the Americans. But there was something fishy about Dieter – a fishiness that was accentuated by the continued appearances and suspicious stares of Kathy Griffiths (Phoebe Fox) from the war crimes unit. You can see where it’s heading – a moral tug of war between national security and natural justice, as someone has to determine whether it’s more important to know how to build rockets than it is to jail bad guys.

Admittedly, that’s a toothsome enough plot, but it was delivered with a self-consciousness that rendered it practically unwatchable. I know food meant something different during rationing, but there were lengthy segments involving cabbage, toffee apples, marmalade and oranges, all in the first half-hour. The dialogue was as flimsy as a prefab – yet if you’ve seen The Lost Prince, Poliakoff’s 2003 drama about the autistic son of George V and Queen Mary, you’ll know that he can turn a phrase. Add to this, the performance of Sturgess as the boffin-soldier-sleuth – with his bizarre vocal inflections he was like a man pretending to be Roger Moore pretending to be a motorbike – and you ended up once again floating

Iaround somewhere in the old is-it-artor-rubbish continuum. I think – I hope – that Close to the Enemy was meant to be closer to art. It’s a noble ambition, you might say, but in an era where television drama has progressed in leaps and bounds, suddenly Poliakoff looks like he hasn’t. At times Close to the Enemy veered close to comedy, which surely can’t be what one of Britain’s few TV auteurs intended.

A lot of credit should go to Richard Taylor for his support in the making of This drama told the story of Taylor’s search for justice for his 10-year-old son, who was murdered in Peckham in 2000. But it didn’t pull any punches. Writer Levi David Addai portrayed Richard Taylor himself as deeply fallible, a man who stayed at home in Nigeria having sent his wife and three children over to London in order to get the best medical treatment for their epileptic daughter.

When he did arrive, following Damilola’s death, the story implied that his initial reaction was to heap blame on to his blameless wife. That wasn’t the only way in which the story surprised, though. The crime itself was not shown, and while there was ample potential for a courtroom whodunit thereafter, that wasn’t Addai’s interest either. Instead he focused on the Taylor family: in particular on Damilola’s older brother Tunde (Juwon Adedokun) striving to make a new life for himself; and the Taylor parents, as they came to terms with their grief and anger and attempted to do something useful with it.

The performances lived up to the writing: they were exceptional throughout. In particular, Babou Ceesay, recently seen as a foul-mouthed defence lawyer in Channel 4’s National Treasure, was remarkable as the bewildered Taylor. Damilola, Our Loved Boy couldn’t help but be moving – the motiveless murder of a bright young boy who’d come to Britain for a better future is enough to make anyone despair – but it could have been mawkish or worse, predictable. In fact, it was neither: and that’s no mean feat.

Jim Sturgess’s bizarre voice was like a cross between Roger Moore and a motor bike