One of the best (if not the jolliest) TV dramas of 2023: BBC1’s Best Interests reviewed

In the opening minutes of Best Interests (Monday and Tuesday), an estranged middle-aged couple made their separate ways to court, pausing outside it to look at each other with a mixture of furious reproach and overwhelming regret. From there we cut to a scene that perhaps overdid the evocation of Happier Times as the same pair laughed endlessly together on a train, before nipping off to the toilet for a spot of giggly conjugal naughtiness. Once they got home and picked up their two daughters from a neighbour, they soon showed what terrific and loving parents they were too – not least to 11-year-old Marnie, whose muscular dystrophy meant she needed especial care.

But then, just as husband Andrew (Michael Sheen) was celebrating the end of a happy day with some Stone Roses and a joint, Marnie suddenly developed an infection and needed the latest of her many trips to hospital. There was, however, one big difference from her previous visits: this time she didn’t get better. Instead, after several weeks of unavailing treatment, her doctor Samantha ominously introduced Marnie’s parents to a palliative-care consultant and recommended that they seriously consider allowing her to die – the alternative being a lot more pain, a lot more brain damage and no realistic chance of recovery.

Even so, mother Nicci (Sharon Horgan) was having none of it. Holding on tight to her mantra about Marnie being a fighter (‘She’s wilful’), she refused to accept the verdict of the doctor, the hospital’s ethics board or the mediator brought in, as Nicci saw it (possibly rightly), to rubber-stamp her daughter’s medically decided fate.

Best Interests is written by Jack Thorne, whose last TV drama was Then Barbara Met Alan: a heartfelt but off-puttingly shrill piece of agitprop about disability rights.