It was the best kind of football drama: very little football

TV REVIEW:WELL THERE'S a first: having a good weep at a football score. Manchester United 3, Sheffield Wednesday 0. But by that point in United(BBC2, Sunday), the BBC's superb drama about the Busby Babes and the Munich air disaster in 1958, pretty much every scene was watched through misty eyes. This was a three-hanky job. Not that its director, James Strong, went for Hallmark sentimentality – and he could have in a feature-length drama about the death of young sporting heroes. United was a measured piece of work, concentrating on the strong characters of the people involved, and was all the more emotional for it.

The striking opening credits established the pace, the era and the tragedy.

The camera panned slowly over polished leather football boots – no logo of course – and simple red jerseys with white trim hanging in a locker room, before arriving at a scene of desolation in a snowy landscape. It’s the aftermath of a plane crash, and two men are strapped into their seats in the middle of the snow. One, Bobby Charlton (Jack O’Connell), wakes up. The story is told through his experience of the events and that of coach Jimmy Murphy (David Tennant).

The action then went back two years to show that Matt Busby’s young Manchester United team weren’t just, as one character says, “the best; they were the most loved”. It was a different time. They lived in digs, went to the pictures together, wore hand-knit cardies and when chatting up girls claimed to be plumbers or carpenters, because as footballers they had only £15 a week and a career that would be over at 40, and no girl would be interested in that.

It was the best kind of football drama: very little football. It was more about the triumph of spirit over circumstances, how the team survived losing eight of the squad through the fortitude of players like Charlton and the drive of Murphy, the coach. (Tennant dialled down his acting style more than a couple of a notches to give a realistic, heartfelt performance.)

It depicted events that are well documented and part of living memory, and so there are quibbles about accuracy: was Matt Busby (Dougray Scott) really such a background character, for instance? But as a deeply moving, powerful drama, United would be hard to beat.

AS IF TO make up for the wedding-themed programmes clogging the schedule this week, Easter weekend served up another top television drama: The Suspicions of Mr Whicher(UTV, Monday). Based on Kate Summerscale's bestseller and starring Paddy Considine – the Mr Whicher of the title – it told the true and scandalous story of a murder in 1860 of a three-year-old child in a prosperous country house. Whicher, the London detective who built his career on his success with the case, later became a private investigator and an inspiration for Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. Considine played him like a cross between Columbo and Morse.

The well-made drama had everything: a brutal murder, courtroom scenes, madness, gossipy servants, a wicked stepmother and local police so in thrall to their betters they got in Whicher's way at every turn. It looked great, too, all scratchy tweed clothes and men with big mutton-chop sideburns. Pater Capaldi, as the deeply unlikable father of the dead child, was so successfully transformed by his facial hair, and the taut economy of the script, that for once I didn't expect him to snap out of it and become Malcolm Tucker, his genius TV creation from The Thick of It.

THE BIG-HOUSE murder mystery as a genre is easy to get, but fantasy? Isn't it all a bit Lord of the Rings,with lots of maps, names that are impossible to remember, scheming dwarfs and blokes with long hair and suspect personal hygiene? So I was puzzled, at first, about Sky Atlantic's warning that there would be "adult themes and strong language" before Game of Thrones(Monday), the much-hyped 10-part fantasy blockbuster from HBO. And then it all became clear, because every time you think you're getting the hang of the plot of this superb-looking drama – which is about vicious political intrigue, ambition and a bloody power struggle – there's a random sex scene involving girl-on-girl action, a brother and sister hard at in the tower, and other graphic candlelit moments involving a hunk of a man, who doesn't appear to own a shirt, and his naked teenage wife.

When it concentrates on the politics and ambition it’s good stuff, with the steely-eyed Sean Bean as Eddard Stark very much the key character. He’s the ruler of Winterfell, one of the Seven Kingdoms governed by a Falstaff-like King Robert (Mark Addy). There’s a scheming queen, Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), and her bookish brother, Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), known as the Imp (he’s the dwarf). All have their own self-motivated schemes and clever plots to work through.

Game of Thronesis set sometime between King Arthur and The Hobbitin a bare could-be-anywhere landscape prone to extreme weather and where war is brewing. Viserys Targaryen (it doesn't quite trip off the tongue), the son of the previous king, is bent on revenge for his father's death, and has enlisted the help of a local warlord, Dothraki.

Up to now – episode two – he's been a mute stud-muffin (otherwise the dialogue is unexpectedly good in Game of Thrones), but presumably he'll be key when the battle scenes happen in later episodes. And they're bound to be bloody: there's been bucket loads of gore already and none of the warlords has even left home yet.

Episode one was chaotic and bewildering, but this week’s episode started to cement a clear plot and it’s hard to recall an American drama with such spectacular use of fur and leather – Peta must be beside itself – with Sean Bean wearing what looks like a stuffed badger as a jaunty scarf.

SOMEWHAT LOST in the strong TV schedule was Kathleen Lynn: The Rebel Doctor(TG4, Monday). It was screened on Easter Monday because Lynn played a key role in the Rising, but she was, as Sé Merry Doyle's film showed, much more than a political revolutionary.

A woman before her time, her real goal was to improve the health of poor infants in Dublin, a city with mortality rates that were compared to that of India and China. She established an infant hospital, Teach Ultan, to cater for the poor and was particularly active in the areas of TB eradication, women’s health and early childhood illnesses. Her vision – and she was a visionary in so many ways – was to join up the children’s hospital on Harcourt Street with her infant hospital on Charlemont Street to provide a more comprehensive service.

Her friend Michael Scott, the architect, drew up plans for the hospital to be built on the canal: it looked amazing. It never happened because the then archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, was afraid that Lynn, a Protestant, would be proselytising and was unhappy with her practice of putting boys and girls on the same ward; they were all under three years of age. His scheming put a stop to it.

The docudrama – Ingrid Craigie played Lynn in some dramatic reconstructions – gave an excellent insight into this extraordinary and inspiring woman, and the wonder is why she’s not better known or better remembered.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

One to get stuck into

The Shadow Line (BBC2, Thursdays), a seven-part conspiracy thriller starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Christopher Eccleston, Stephen Rea and Rafe Spall.