A friend recently told me I must watch Total Wipeout (BBC1 Saturdays). I watched seven minutes of it on the iPlayer, and messaged him to ask if he had been drinking. His reply hinted at snobbery on my part, a charge grave enough for a TV writer to restart the repeat – and to wish that I had been drinking, at least a six-pack.

Total Wipeout is the settee equivalent of the Bacchanalia that is Britain’s Saturday night, a thing evidently enjoyed most when ... totally wiped out, or better, on the way to it, and the sight of men and women thrashing and plunging and slithering and crawling across soft plastic obstacle courses of increasing difficulty rising above water, or sometimes mud, would render you helpless with laughter.

TW captivates by building tension and by its pared-down clarity, as one after another – shop assistant, fireman, radiologist, trainee clown – do the same thing, time after time, simple, straightforward, imparting none of the anxiety in the audience that quiz shows do, leaving you with the nagging sliver of self-contempt that you forgot the capital of Venezuela.

Its main presenter, Richard Hammond, a 39-year-old veteran of car programmes (and a 280mph car smash in 2006), has a nice line in mock enthusiastic irony, echoed more thinly by the Irish former model Amanda Byram, who hovers by the edge of the obstacle pool – which is in Argentina, for no obvious reason – to urge on the competitors, interview them when they stagger out (“awesome!” “knackered!” “excellent!”) and coo in bogus pity as a gang of Argentinian mercenaries, one in a fake beard, hurls balls at contestants as they slither over the course.

Hammond ends the show by saying that the audience should return next week “to watch more people falling off big things and getting very wet”. He is more militant, though, for the values it promotes (or doesn’t) than that falsely modest sign-off suggests, saying in an interview early this year that “it is not complicated, it’s just laughing at people overstretching themselves. It’s not claiming to change people’s lives. Too many shows say they can change your life ... and people are sat at home thinking, ‘I don’t want my bloody life changing, I’ve spent a long time getting it sorted out, I like it’.”

If by that self-serving comment Hammond means testing drama, then he is wrong, at least by the measure that means most in TV, the ratings. Total Wipeout’s ratings of 4m to 5m are matched by those of The Street (BBC1 Mondays), the most testing – at least in emotional terms – drama of recent times. These six plays, co-authored by the Liverpool writer Jimmy McGovern, are dramas of redemption – in part through cleaving to, or rediscovering, fidelity to a secular ethical code, in part through stoicism, in part through love. Love of a mother for a Down’s syndrome child; of a prostitute for her two kids, for whose better education she pursues her hated trade; of a young woman for a soldier fiancé disfigured in Afghanistan; of a man won over, usually by women’s example, to what he once hated – an “abnormal” child, a Polish immigrant, his own disfigured face and self.

In the last episode this week past, the magnificent Timothy Spall played a taxi driver whose soft heart led him to sleep with a yearning, plain workmate. Unable to lie, he is confronted by an angry wife in a scene of actorial brilliance in an Indian restaurant – anger that brings on a fatal heart-attack. In a funeral oration that must have launched a thousand settee sobs, Spall attains the summit in a declaration of dumpy, middle-aged, enduring passion.

This was drama that succeeded by keeping its focus steadily on the micro-societies of one street – in which the natural leader is a publican (Bob Hoskins), a role model is the prostitute (Anna Friel) and a saint is a Polish cleaner (Julia Krynke). The morals are worked out on a code of survival and rough decency; no priest is seen, nor any figure of professional authority or wealth. The damaged soldier’s fiancée, a primary school teacher, is the poshest it gets.

When Kieran (Joseph Mawle), before his redemption by his Polish hate-love, rails against immigrants, he is not presented as a British National party caricature but as one whose resentment stems from his struggles at the lower end of the job market, with immigrants scrambling for work at lower rates of pay than he has ever had to tolerate – the lot of many of the lower-paid for the past decade.

McGovern has spoken bitterly about the stereotypes of working-class men peddled by the left. In this series, he has sought to redeem a class, and to re-plough the furrows cleaved by the self-help writers of a century and a half ago – Samuel Smiles in Britain and Horatio Alger in the US (he is a much better writer than both).

Absorbing and harrowing dramas, they also do what Hammond condemned such offerings for doing: they seek to show examples of courage, stoicism and love, and by doing so, to – why not? – change people’s lives. Television can be fine as well as fun; in his contempt for the fine, Hammond reveals the intolerance as well as the philistinism of those who control the spigots of fun. Not all television has to be like that.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd