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depress, then boy oh boy are you in for a treat, because this week on Channel 4 there’s a major new series called ‘Concrete and Piss’, in which an unemployed alcoholic stands in a tower block stairwell on the Thatcher’s Legacy estate, mindlessly thrashing a mouldy old mattress with the ulcerated leg of his dead junkie son, pausing every three minutes to scream, swear, and receive violent blows to the face and neck from a hunchbacked loan shark.
    OK. Not really. But you have to admit it’s a brilliant title. Instead, there’s a new mini-series called Never, Never (C4), which fulfils pretty much every other criterion of ‘gritty, uncompromising’ drama you could think of. Let’s run through the recipe and check off the ingredients.
    First, and most important, do we have a bleak contemporary setting? Check: the action takes place on a grim London council estate that looks as though it was designed by a misanthropic concrete fetishist with a massive grudge and an even bigger migraine; a sprawling campus of despair that sucks all the hope out of everyone inside, then pisses it down the walls of the malfunctioning elevators. This is not The Vicar Of Dibley .
    How about some social comment? Check: the series centres on a cold-blooded salesman (John Simm) who makes his living coercing downtrodden inmates of said estate into buying expensive brand-name goods from a sinister company charging absurd rates of interest. Thanks to their undesirable postcode, the customers can’t get credit anywhere else – but their kids are demanding Phat Nikes and Pokemon play sets, and won’t stop screaming till they get them. The hapless parents sink into a mire of debt while the salesman cackles himself sick.
    Next: Casual violence? Check: a major character endures a vicious baseball bat attack within the first 25 minutes.
    Additional unpleasant, hand-wringing, gracious-me-isn’t-modern-society-going-tits-up touches? Check: immediately after the beating, the comatose victim is robbed of his shoes by a pair of opportunistic schoolkids (who could have scored bonus points for weeing in his face and laughing, but didn’t).
    Rasping cockneys? Check: you know that unbelievably raspy and weather-beaten young cockney bloke who played a scrawny nihilistic smackhead with a spider’s web tattooed all over his apocalyptic chops in Nil By Mouth ? The one who could never, in a million billion years, land the head role in a Noel Coward biopic but could convincingly play all four members of the Sex Pistols at once? He’s in this, playing a scrawny nihilistic cockney in a stained vest.
    Perhaps I’m alone on this, but I’ve always found him incredibly watchable: he should have his own series, playing an unconventional inner-city detective who chases suspected criminals down alleyways, wielding a bit of scaffolding with a razorblade taped to the end, signing off each episode by squatting in a phonebox pumping smack into his eye. Come on, ITV: you could do with gritty new Morse for the twenty-first century.

    Speaking of heroin, does Never, Never also feature substance abuse? Check: toilet-bound coke-snorting, an old man plied with whisky, and an unconscious junkie flopping to the pavement. There’s also a bit where John Simm spoons custard into his mouth as though it’s a tub of liquid crack, but that doesn’t really count.
    Gratuitous bad language? Big bold check: this is possibly the most swearsome broadcast of the year. Someone says ‘fuck’ every couple of seconds. It’s like product placement for the Fuck Corporation. Even the walls and ceilings appear to be saying it at times. All your other slang favourites put in an appearance too, with the exception of the c-word, although I think at one point a trail of saliva dribbling from the mouth of a collapsed drug addict is trying to spell it out, and gets as far as the letter ‘n’ before someone else says ‘fuck’ and the spittle sighs and gives up and it cuts to a different scene.
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