‘The British don’t revolt, they grumble,’ said someone in the first episode of The Way. But what if we ever reversed this policy? That was the question posed by a drama that’s clearly a passion project for its director, Michael Sheen – and therefore set in Wales.

More specifically, The Way takes place in Port Talbot, the south Welsh town in which Sheen grew up and to which he moved back a few years ago, unexpectedly preferring it to LA. Or at least it takes place in a version of Port Talbot – because, perhaps necessarily for a show about a British revolution, there are hefty elements of the dream-like amid the realism.

You could accuse Breathtaking of relying on hindsight – but given its white hot fury, I wouldn’t

At the centre of the programme, as of the town, are the steelworks – which as one character said (and recent real-life announcements have confirmed) are ‘always under threat’. Near the start, this threat suddenly became very real and, during a town meeting, the formidably matriarchal Dee called for pre-emptive industrial action, just like in the glory days of the General Strike and the miners’ fight of 1984.

Left to his own devices, I suspect Sheen would have been unequivocally in favour of mounting the barricades. Luckily, his choice of screenwriter here is James Graham, who specialises in winningly nuanced political dramas. As a result, Dee’s husband Geoff reminded her that both the strikes she mentioned had ended in cataclysmic, if predictable, defeat.

Later, in one of the more obviously dream-like moments, Geoff continued this argument with the ghost of his father Denny (played by Sheen), a miners’ leader in the 1980s and a local hero ever since. Denny, however, had committed suicide soon after his men lost, seemingly out of shame for believing in sentimental leftie nonsense.

Denny’s ghost acknowledged that the workers’ struggle has been wildly romanticised in Port Talbot but, in yet another persuasive counter-argument, questioned whether Geoff was right to back the alternative: to simply accept your own powerlessness and therefore do nothing at all – except, of course, grumble.

Meanwhile, back at the meeting, the hotheads had prevailed and the revolution took off, spreading to all parts of Wales. Granted, at no stage did this feel like anything other than a fantasy. But The Way simultaneously managed the neat trick of making us ask why it had to be one. (Not incidentally, the other person Sheen brought in to work on The Way is Adam Curtis, maker of all those documentaries exploring the widespread modern unease about the apparent inability of anybody to do anything about anything.)

With the final two episodes set to turn the main characters into refugees elsewhere in the UK, The Way may yet prove to have bitten off more meaty ideas than it can chew in what’s also a fairly standard family drama. Nonetheless, there’s no denying that so far the chewing is going rather well.

The Way

At which point, I’d liked to have brought you some light relief. Unfortunately, the week’s other big new drama was Breathtaking, based on the memoir by Rachel Clarke, who was an NHS doctor during Covid, and co-written with Jed Mercurio, who before Line of Duty specialised in ferociously dark medical shows – and before that, was a doctor himself. The resulting three-parter duly turned out to have a level of anger possibly beyond even that of Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

Breathtaking began with Matt Hancock saying in February 2020: ‘The public can be assured that we have a clear plan.’ It continued for the next three hours proving over and over again what a lie that was. The programme also resembled a horror movie – and not just because of the endless procession of sick people.

In the traditional role of the scientist whose obviously true warnings were being ignored was Dr Abbey Henderson (Joanne Froggatt). Playing the complacent town mayor was pretty much everybody above her, who insisted that she follow such successive guidelines as not testing anyone who hadn’t been abroad, not ordering PPE for healthcare staff and discharging asymptomatic oldies back into care homes.

At times, you could possibly accuse Breathtaking of relying on hindsight – but, given its relentless white-hot fury, I wouldn’t if I were you. For the same reason, though, I did wonder about the wisdom of showing it on consecutive nights. The unstoppable piling on of the misery – interspersed only with official stupidity – ran the risk of becoming increasingly numbing, as scene after scene followed exactly the same pattern, beginning with a doomed cougher saying how much they loved their family.

In the end, it was clear that the programme’s anger was righteous as well as heartfelt. The trouble is that this was also clear at the start, in the middle and at all points in between – meaning that, judged purely as drama, Breathtaking often felt hamstrung by its own fervour.

Breathtaking