It’s not often you get a drama capable of explaining the roots of the world’s current financial woes more adeptly than Robert Peston and keep you interested, but Dominic Savage’s sobering state-of-the-nation piece did just that. A blistering, feature-length attack on credit-crunched Britain, Freefall had the luxury of both an all-star cast and a writer/director in Savage happy to carry on the mantle of the likes of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh to get the most from them.

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Set in the heady days of 2007, when the credit bubble was yet to burst, Gus (Aidan Gillen) was sitting pretty at the top of his banking tree while Dave (Dominic Cooper) was happily selling anyone who’ll listen down the river with a discounted mortgage they wouldn’t be able to afford. Anyone, that is, including his old school mate, Jim (Joseph Mawle), still stuck on the same estate where he grew up. Fast-forward a year and the credit-fuelled world of all three starts to collapse around their ears, with all-too familiar consequences.

A semi-improvised script and real people dotted throughout gave Fallout the eerie, real-life feeling of a documentary, underlined by the handheld camerawork and close crops. Incidental music is just that – incidental – and served effectively to highlight the disparity between the high-life of Gus with the hard slog of Jim and Mandy’s life.

The great thing about Savage’s work here is there were no completely innocent parties in this precarious credit pyramid – just different levels of human greed. From Gus and Dave, whose lives are defined by the trappings of success, right down to the Jim, who just couldn’t help but be tempted by Dave’s promises of a big house and respectability that play on his male pride. The one thing they all had in common was a blindness to see the things of real value – their relationships with those close to them.

It was a fairly damning verdict on the consumer culture so prevalent in today’s society, and certainly got across the message that it is a collective mentality and lack of accountability that has got us into the state we’re in. It was also a bloody good piece of TV in the best traditions of British drama as social commentary.