Accused, BBC One

With a title like Accused it would be easy to imagine that Jimmy McGovern’s new series was going to be just another generic courtroom drama, but McGovern would never be that predictable. The man who made Brookside grittily unmissable back in the 1980s, reinvented the TV crime genre with Cracker in the 1990s, and then settled into full maturity with The Street which ended last year, would probably rather retire than deliver anything that wasn’t in some sense fresh and innovative. He’s now one of only a handful of TV writers whose name alone guarantees a certain kind of direct, powerful drama honed by heart, intellect and political idealism.

Accused consists of six individual stories which I assume will follow the structural template of the first one which went out last night. Willy’s Story was just that: it focused solely on the circumstances that led to one ordinary, normally law-abiding family man ending up behind bars waiting to go into court for sentencing. But the camera only moved into the courtroom for the couple of minutes it took for the verdict and sentence to be delivered, at the very end of an hour of tense, moving and occasionally blackly funny drama.

Only McGovern could come up with a new situation in which the words 'I love you' could be spoken by a man to his wife in a wholly fresh way

Willy the plumber (played with typical nervy, temple-pulsing intensity by Christopher Eccleston) is a typical McGovern character; fervidly working class, proudly bloody-minded, but tragically lacking in the superhuman moral fibre he’d need to pull himself out of the mess he has partly made for himself, and partly had thrust upon him. One of McGovern’s talents is that he rarely allows a character to merely be a foil for his plots. Another is that he never allows the viewer to feel completely comfortable either empathising with or despising the deeply flawed individuals he puts through the mire.

This was the story of how a normally law-abiding citizen can be turned into a desperate law breaker by a chain of circumstances partly beyond their control. I say “partly” because Willy does at least one very stupid thing at a key moment in the story, and it was the mind-numbing implausibility of this plot development - as well as Willy’s response to it - which was the story’s only weakness. You’d have to be a genius rather than merely a great talent to pull off a scene in which a man who has just found he is £22,000 in debt then spots a jiffy bag in the back of a cab which is stuffed full of bank notes to the handy value of £20,000, which effectively means that McGovern is just a great talent.

The only other thing that jarred was the character of the Catholic priest. Willy encounters him when, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he goes to church in order to try to strike up a deal with God to help him out. This irritatingly cheery priest, whose uncanny instincts could only be credible if he were omnipresent, seemed a highly unlikely McGovern (pictured right) character. He came across like cuddly Clarence the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life as he smiled knowingly while telling Willy some home truths (and simultaneously pissing him off by inexplicably knowing about his mistress).

A few weeks later he also somehow knew that Willy still hadn’t dropped his mistress. The inference was that the mess Willy was in was down to his sexual infidelity rather than his hot temper, addiction to drink and gambling, and stubborn class-steeped pride - which just didn’t sit well with what was otherwise a tone of only slightly heightened realism.

But it was possible to suspend a couple of moments of disbelief just to enjoy Eccleston’s pitch-perfect portrayal of a man enduring a spectacularly destructive midlife crisis. And only McGovern could come up with a new situation in which the words “I love you” could be spoken by a man to his wife in a wholly fresh way; those three little words were movingly delivered by Eccleston as a sudden epiphany which took both him and then his wife by surprise.

But the best thing about this fast-paced hour of telly was the brilliant yet obvious conceit at its centre. McGovern clearly realised that the courtroom drama with its claustrophobic stuffiness, mannered rituals and contained histrionics was now far too familiar from decades of films and TV to still leave room for originality. So he just gave the courtroom around a minute of screen time at the front and back end of his story. In between he did what he knows how to do best; show us versions of our flawed but sometimes well-intentioned selves being tested beyond endurance. It wasn't the kind of escapist, cosy viewing pleasure that, say, Downton Abbey was, but it left much more of a lasting impression.

• Find Jimmy McGovern on Amazon
• Watch Accused on BBC iPlayer