At first this seems just an entertaining throwback to those portmanteau films that stuck a few ghost tales together, added some kind of sinister, squinting narrator and hoped for the best – but the modern story that links everything together here turns out to be properly terrifying.

Can’t say much more without spoiling it – just watch it quick, and don’t answer that knock at the door…

Brooker’s respectful—even humble—with the writers and, in turn, they’re frank and disarmingly modest about the process: about the endless cups of tea and the fear and the drudgery of the first draft but also about the elation of seeing the finished product and the compulsion to write.

It’s really inspiring TV and, for anyone who’s ever attempted to write anything (and that’s, like, everyone now, right?), it’s really encouraging and of genuine practical use. I know for certain that professors of creative writing everywhere will be pirating this wholesale so they can put the video on and nip out for a smoke without feeling guilty. Absolutely superb TV.

Art therapy was demonstrated by a couple of easels in a corridor, a couple of exterior shots of a lawn told us it was an opulent facility. But best of all was Lola’s response to her new environment from rolling her eyes at the cuts on the arm of a self-harmer, to laughing at an ex-colleague and victim of a mental breakdown because he wanted to be called by a different name to responding with a “God no!” when asked if she’d ever worked in a place like this before. You don’t have to be mad to watch it but…

Anyway its a brilliant drama, with a heartbreaking ending that well, er stay with you for thirty years. Nigel Hawthorne is especially good as a sadistic army officer tester and Michael Elphick looking (pre Boon, pre Booze) very young and chirpy. The theme tune is hilarious. The best thing Jack Rosenthal and Euston Films ever did.

As it was all on in the last seven days all five parts are currently available in the ever-so-brief window of opportunity. It makes you realise what was lost when they stripped series-stacking out of iPlayer. Shame.

“The story you are about to see really took place

…only with less swearing and more nudity.”

I’m being naughty, posting something that’s half way to expiring on iPlayer, but I only got a chance to watch this last night, and it’s a complete corker. So, run! run! to watch it in the next 3 days.

Mary Whitehouse. You wouldn’t think she’d be the most sympathetic central figure in a film; I certainly remember her as an anemone-hatted battle-axe, grumbling about trivialities in the early 80s. Amanda Coe‘s script shows a reasonable woman whose position ossified as she was ignored by the BBC and ridiculed by the new satirical comedy movement growing out of the Establishment club and TW3. There’s some proper private tragedy in there for good measure, too.

BBC Four also put out a supporting documentary about the censorship of entertainment at the BBC, Auntie’s War on Smut which gives a useful bit of historical background to the drama. It serves to highlight how knowledgeable and well made the film is by contextualising the ‘new morality’ of the 60s permissive society.

Having said that, it’s the little details in this one that give it life – it’s crammed with incidental jokes, and blimey, what a cast. As a one-off drama, it’s a very good one. As a biopic, it’s bloody amazing.

(Whilst the writing credit is to Amanda Coe, the film was based on an original idea by Patrick Reams. Credit where credit’s due, etc.)