At last, something intelligent on a terrestrial channel. It’s been a long time coming. There was a time, of course, when the BBC and the others regularly produced gems, but the years between these classics just seems to get longer and longer. American HBO is different. They are churning them out in rapid succession. They are arguably light years ahead of the Brits now and the gap seems to be getting wider. I never imagined myself pro-offing such a glowing trans Atlantic sentiment but facts are stubborn things. There is simply no comparison between say, the Soprano’s, The Wire, and best of all, In Treatment, with such turgid fare as Downton Abbey and all the rest of the highly predictable English costume dramas.

Some of the Dickens and Shakespearean re-enactments can hold the attention but they don’t exactly require much new cerebral effort. As for the contemporary dramatic offerings, most of them are only just a nudge above the weekly soaps.

It wasn’t always so. I Claudius was, and remains, in my aging opinion, unsurpassed, on either side of the Atlantic. Talking To a Stranger, with Judi Dench still has a contemporary resonance. On the cop front, I still rate highly Z Cars and its successor, Softly Softly, and Morse is still, twenty years on, just pure pleasure. Alan Bennet’s Talking Heads and Dennis Potters trilogy of musical satires, The Singing Detective, Pennies From Heaven, and Lipstick On My Collar take some beating. Boys From the Blackstuff, Our Friends From the North, A Very British Coup, and This Life, are in a class of their own and all, in their own way, are testimony to the once unrivalled brilliance of British television. But those days seem long gone. On the European front, Poland’s Dekalog, and Germany’s Heimat stand tall amongst the weeds, but these days it all seems to be coming from the US of A.

Given the sad decline of original and challenging British TV drama, it was a pleasant surprise to sit through the four episodes of Channel 4’s The Promise. Admittedly the acting was a little wooden and the plot more than a little contrived in places, but notwithstanding, it was a brave piece of television, mercilessly free of cheap sentiment and politically, it gave the viewer plenty to chew on. The interplay between the two historical periods worked really well and a key part of world history has been cleverly brought back to life. Israel, in all its myriad forms; liberal, Zionist, militaristic and settler, came in for a thorough examination and only the most rabid of Zionist apologists could be but moved by the monstrous injustice that has been and is being inflicted on the Palestinian people.

My only regret is that even more aspects of the ongoing struggle, like Britain’s imperial complicity in the mess, were not explored in more detail, and that the four episodes might easily have been doubled or trebled to really develop and expose the historical and contemporary contradictions. Nevertheless, a damn good piece of TV and you can bet your last shekel that all the rabid Zionist Rabbis around the world were squirming in their righteous synagogues as the story unfolded.

A pity too, that there was no time to explore the growing divisions between the secular and Islamic forces currently polarising Palestinian society. I suspect that the mad mullahs and the rabid rabbis have far more in common than they dare to admit. This could have made a useful sub plot to the main story.

The writers and producers will no doubt be accused by the Zionist lobby of anti-semitism, the usual method of attempting to deflect serious criticism of the colonial and expansionist policies of Israel. Jonathan Freedland, writing in the Guardian 3/3/11 does nobody any favours by hopelessly blurring the line between crude anti-semitism as practised by the likes of John Galliano and genuine criticism of the militaristic, neo fascistic state that has become the modern Israel. By conflating the two quite different polemics, one based on irrational hatred, the other based on a legitimate right to expose injustice from whatever quarter it may arise, Freedland unwittingly plays into the hands of the still not inconsiderable anti-semitic mindset that continues to fester in parts of the global consciousness. From my personal perspective, any state founded on religious exclusivity is an anathema to modernity, a relic from feudal times, and the advocates of such a state, be they mullahs, rabbis or priests, belong in the overflowing dustbin of history.

The whole production had, of course, an added poignancy as today’s dramatic events in the Arab world continue to unfold. This is not some academic piece of history that the writers have served up. This is about as contemporary as it can get. The explosive combination of oil, of regional political and religious supremacy and global power politics makes The Promise a drama for our times. Let’s just hope that British television can serve up more of this sort of stuff, starting perhaps with the murky world of international banking finance and their secretive network of offshore tax havens. Or then again, this might be just a little too contemporary for our cultural guardians at the BBC. Better stick to Strictly Come Dancing and another decade of Casualty and Holby City.