The Street is often referred to as gritty. A gritty drama. I’m not sure what happens when you increase the level of grittiness. Does the grit get sharper? Does it get bigger, like gravel, and then pebbles, and even perhaps those purple rocks that posh people put around their little plastic ponds in the garden?

Last night’s Street started off as they all do – with an ordinary family. They were celebrating a birthday. But as the layers of social behaviour were peeled back, and the real people underneath were gradually revealed it turned into probably the grittiest episode of the lot. So gritty that I half expected to see large boulders with extremely sharp edges flying about.

Gary and Ian are cousins. It was Ian’s Mum, Kath, who had been celebrating her birthday, in the absence of Ian’s Dad who, it turns out, is banged up. He’s banged up for selling weed, but when Gary and Ian go out for the night, one of the girls they meet tells Ian that can’t be true. You don’t get banged up for selling weed.

Ian’s upset about this, more because his Mum lied to him than anything. On top of that he recognises the girls that Gary is so enamoured with as PTs and storms out of the club to grab a taxi. Realising he’s gone, Gary rushes after him and is just in time to jump in front of the cab. A few moments later, the cab has to stop so Gary can puke and the cab driver decides he’s had enough. He throws Ian out, pushing him across the road. The drunken Gary takes exception to this and subjects the cabbie to a violent assault, slamming his head in the cab door repeatedly. But the controller has heard the commotion and called in a “Yellow 1″ alert. Four other cabs converge on the area as Gary takes to his heels.

Ian, realising the cabbie is badly hurt, stays behind and tries to call for help, but the other drivers misinterpret his actions and believe he is responsible for the attack.

And here, the two families begin to diverge, and Gary’s family starts to splinter too. Because although he hides his bloodied shirt in next door’s bin, he can’t hide the fact that he’s changed his shirt from his Mum. She knows he’s lying from the start, and she knows why. And all it took for Gina McKee, as Gary’s mother Jan, to convey that to us was a single look.

Back at Ian’s his mum and the rest of the family are waiting up for him, but he’s stuck in a cell at the local nick. The message is passed on by local cabbie Eddie, and Kath heads for the station. “Will you be back in time to make me butties?” wails her youngest son. It’s little touches of dialogue like that that lift McGovern’s work out of the ordinary. He sprinkles his dramas with countless gems like these to lift the darkest parts, or add pathos to the humour. There are so many shades of grey to The Street, but it IS all grey.

In the end, Gary confesses to his Mum, who lays into him with those feeble slaps that always hurt the most. “If it looks bad for Ian, I’ll tell the truth,” he promises her; words that will shortly come back to haunt not only him, but the whole family. Bailed from the nick, Ian returns home and asks his Mum for the truth about his Dad. He was a heroin dealer, and got caught with half a kilo.

Both families attend a leaving do at their local for Gary, who’s off to join the navy. While Gary sings “Sailing” on the karaoke, the police arrive to arrest Ian for murder – the cab driver never regained consciousness and died an hour earlier. Gary sings louder, trying to block out Ian’s shouts for him to tell the truth. In the end, it’s too much for him and he starts across the floor, only to be held back by his Mum, Ian’s auntie, who insists he must keep quiet.

The fracture between the two families, brilliantly written and even more brilliantly delivered by this strong cast, turns into a chasm as Jan refuses to allow Gary to confess. Husband Danny (Lorcan Cranitch – who didn’t have much to say but who made every single syllable count) can’t understand his wife. “Her son is innocent, but ours is guilty,” he murmurs, succinctly summing up the situation. Before long, Kath is round hammering on the door but Jan won’t let her in. She fetches her set of keys and lets herself in. The next scene was nothing short of genius, as Kath rants at her sister, trying to bring her to her senses while all the while Jan keeps up a babbling stream of denial, shutting out her sister’s words and trying, but failing, to shut out her own thoughts.

Danny can take no more. He packs his bags and leaves, passing his son on the doorstep with the terrible words, “how come a drug dealer got a better son than me.”

At the police station, Ian is interviewed. Having been to see his Dad in prison and been advised by him to “drop Gary in it,” he does. But Jan and Gary keep up their united front of denial, and Ian is distraught. He believes the police will find out about his Dad, and assume “like father, like son.” Kath reassures him that the police won’t know about his Dad. In another room, at exactly the same time, Jan is telling the detectives that Ian’s Dad is banged up for dealing heroin. There are no depths to which she won’t sink to defend her son and his promising career in the Navy. Betrayal of her sister and her nephew seems a small price to pay. Fortunately for Ian, Gary’s Dad realises that the price may seem small, but it will end up ruining everyone’s lives. On the pretext of driving him to the station, Danny picks Gary up from home and persuades him to turn himself in.

Last minute cop-out to provide the happy ending notwithstanding, this was some of the most powerful stuff we’ve seen on The Street. Utterly believable both in the writing and the realisation, the inability of Jan to allow anything to stand in her son’s way, even if it meant an innocent relative going to jail, made riveting viewing. A follow-up story about how the two halves of the family tried to put themselves back together after such a bitter split would definitely be worth stopping in for.

Next week: Postman Wayne (Mark Benton) – whose marriage breakup we have caught glimpses of as it spills out onto the pavement – takes a career-limiting risk to buy himself a holiday.

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3