A Bitter Draught by Bob Stanley, Times Online

Patrick Hamilton was a writer’s writer. Most of his books are out of print, and there have been long periods when not one was available to buy. Seen as touchstones by authors from J.B. Priestley to Iain Sinclair, his early novels are now so rare that collectors pay a fortune for them, proof of how few copies were sold. His penny-thriller plays (Gaslight, Rope), on the other hand, were huge successes and natural film fodder.

The nocturnal and alcohol-soaked novels proved to be more of a challenge, one that the BBC has accepted in adapting Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. In the three books that were collected under this one name in 1935, Hamilton discovered that to symbolise the whole rootless population of London, he needed to focus on only a few characters and one setting, The Midnight Bell pub, where Bob and Ella work. Bob is young and handsome, but drinks heavily and falls for a prostitute called Jenny, who slowly tears his life to shreds. Ella, secretly in love with Bob, watches helplessly.

Oddly, it is filmed in an impure monochrome, like a colourised film that has been left in a damp cellar: once you get used to it, the relentless greys, greens and browns of 1930s Fitzrovia look all the glummer for it. This is just about the only liberty taken – the screenplay adheres to Hamilton’s dialogue without missing a beat.

Which puts a lot of pressure on the performances. Zoë Tapper’s Jenny is as dizzyingly pretty, blonde and coquettish as she is blank, a combination that is intriguing enough to ensnare Bob. When he proudly points out that Dickens used to live on the same street as her, Jenny giggles: -Dickens! Silly old bugger, ain’t he?-

Ella is clearly warmhearted but, rejected by Bob, can find no outlet for her generosity. The doe-eyed Sally Hawkins of Fingersmith has a melancholy face that betrays Ella’s endless disappointments. Still, her stoicism can’t prepare her for the leech-like attentions of Mr Ernest Eccles (Phil Davis). You can smell his rotten teeth and stale breath. He is fabulously horrid.

The only real flat note is Bryan Dick’s Bob: streetwise and smirking, he seems far too savvy to fall for gauche Jenny’s looks alone – Hamilton’s creation was surely more bookish. While Jenny’s daft comment on Dickens should ruin the learned Bob’s whole evening, here he just rolls his eyes as if it to say: -Women, eh?- We never really understand his intentions; why doesn’t he just slip her a tenner and get it over with?

It’s hard to fault the settings or the score (think Pennies from Heaven), and attention to detail in a BBC period drama is something to be treasured after their Tweenies makeover job on Casanova. The final episode of this three-part adaptation – with Ella fending off Eccles – is particularly claustrophobic, engrained with sooty black humour. This is the first time that anyone has captured the fug and fog of Hamilton’s novels – no small feat.

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