If there were special awards for Most Subtlety in a Television Drama, Tuesday’s Partygate would be unlikely to win one. You could also argue that, in contrast to most of its characters, it didn’t really bring much to the party. And yet, in a rare challenge to the law of diminishing returns, the more it pounded away with its sledgehammer, the more effective it became.

Despite the programme’s commitment to a thoroughly researched veracity that extended to the use of on-screen footnotes, the framework for the pounding was supplied by two fictional characters. Grace Greenwood (Georgie Henley) was a shining-eyed true Johnson believer from Darlington, who couldn’t believe her luck at ending up with the cool kids in No. 10. Providing the worldliness was the terrifyingly poised Annabel D’acre (Ophelia Lovibond), who might as well have been wearing a tiara with the word ‘Entitled’ inscribed in diamonds.

Having got over her puzzlement as to where Darlington was, Annabel explained to Grace (and to us) how the Downing Street staff knew each other – mainly from Oxford. She also enlisted Grace’s help in buying extra booze for a party held in May 2020 when, as the programme made characteristically clear: a) Britain had recently announced the highest Covid death rates in the world; b) most people were assiduously following the lockdown guidelines; c) the police were breaking up the gatherings of any who weren’t; and d) one couple had just made themselves hazmat suits so as to hold their new granddaughter.

And this, on the whole, was how this one-off drama proceeded from then on. Scrupulously annotated scenes of drunken Westminster poshos dancing together were juxtaposed with news footage of the most extreme examples of the impact of Covid rules on ordinary folk. A former member of the Black Watch celebrated his 100th birthday by forlornly waving at his family. People at funerals were forbidden from consoling their newly widowed mothers. Any number of grans died alone.

And all the time, Boris Johnson kept the rules coming – at least when he wasn’t (at ‘Party No. 7’) welcoming his underlings to ‘the most unsocially distanced occasion in the UK’.

For a while, the only people in Downing Street wondering if this was a little on the dodgy side were the cleaners. ‘They don’t even wear masks,’ said one as they tidied up another huge batch of empty bottles. But eventually Grace’s non-posho status enabled her to share their misgivings. ‘Is there anything we don’t hold a party for?’ she wondered as three more took place on the same night (and not long before a young man in Leeds was fined £10,000 for organising a snowball fight). ‘It’s our job to make the rules… not to follow the rules,’ Annabel duly told her. The big finish was a brisk anthology of the real-life Boris’s 2022 declarations that ‘the guidance and rules were followed at all times’.

When Partygate was in its early stages, I rather expected that this review would major on its lack of nuance. Ultimately, though, its anger seemed so obviously righteous – and its recitation of chapter and verse so increasingly shocking – that I couldn’t imagine even the most Cavalier of viewers not being in touch with their inner Roundhead.

The drama series Boiling Point follows on from the 2021 film of the same name set in the particularly accident-prone kitchen of an upmarket London restaurant. Back then the boss was the drink- and drug-addicted Andy Jones (Stephen Graham), who ended the movie having a well-earned heart attack. Now most of his former staff have joined his assistant Carly in her new venture, which has the possibly ambitious idea of giving traditional northern cuisine a five-star London twist.

The film was done in a single shot, as was Sunday’s ten-minute adrenaline rush of a pre-title sequence. After that, things did settle down a bit – but only a bit, because even when permitting itself the luxury of discrete scenes, Boiling Point proceeds at quite a lick, giving us a blizzard of characters, plots and kitchen-related disasters without ever skimping on the quickfire dialogue or the mouth-watering shots of high-speed food preparation.

The only bad news for viewers was that Andy’s continuing recuperation meant that we had few sightings of Stephen Graham. Not until the closing scenes did Andy appear, living his new life of drinking lots of beer in front of the snooker – or ‘living the dream’ as some of us might call it.

Weirdly, however, Andy was not among them – and the episode ended with hints that he might be about to rally, renew his relationship with Carly and pick up his knives once more. If he does, I’d firmly suggest, a show that’s already off to a fine, sure-footed start will soon get even better.