Downhill racers; You wait all year for a great one-off British drama,

bodily harmMonday/Tuesday, 10pm, Channel 4 falling apartThursday, 10pm, Channel 4

WE'VE made it safe for television programmers to assume that most of us are pretty neutral. It doesn't really matter whether you're a gaping thicko who looks at the screen the same way a baby stares at a spinning washing machine, or you're a big-brain who sits there vaguely enjoying that low addictive buzz of superiority that comes from having your intelligence insulted - either way you'll probably watch whatever. Most people's days are humdrum or worse, and nobody - genius or goat - is ever honestly in the mood to see anything too sad or serious. You don't watch TV to stare into a mirror or the goddamn abyss. Dumb me down, but don't bring me down.

Channel 4 however, has picked this week to hit us with two new sucker-punching reality check dramas. They're no fun at all, but they're both good, and good British dramas are so rare that you should force yourself to watch them.

Falling Apart is an intense, well-played one-off about a short, violent marriage. Hermione Norris and Mark Strong play a healthy, wealthy modern couple (he's hardly the drunken, boorish wife-beater, and she's hardly a mousy doormat) gradually shattered by Strong's rumbling inferiority complex. First-time writer Anna Maloney based her script on real-life testimony, and if the he-said/she-said monologues to camera seem cliched, maybe it's because these stories are always more or less the same. Norris and Strong bring believable detail to all the apologising and rationalising, his aggression the horrible product of insidious weakness.

In Bodily Harm, Timothy Spall plays an everyman/nothingman who's just as reluctant as the rest of us to look at the bigger, blacker picture, and who'd never ever watch a TV programme as howlingly morbid and forlorn as this one.

Real life might be a slow rubbing process of loss and disillusionment, but writer Tony Grounds obliterates this guy's every rock and shelter over the course of one grotesquely doomy birthday - he's sacked from his City job, his chirpy cheap wife is caught giving his thuggish neighbour a furtive blow job, his stone-cold father is planning to take the ultimate shortcut through his terminal cancer, and his mother wants to go too. By now, Spall has almost been typecast as the soul-suffering British commuter, his big haunted eyes staring a thousand yards out from his chubby, cheerful face, and he would seem like a caricature here, if he didn't downplay so plausibly. Plummeting towards a personal apocalypse like a lift with all the cables cut, he scrambles to find a positive, to try and learn something useful like anyone would. But he can't.

"Whip all the blinkers off," he says in a moment of awful wonder, "and any of us would burn the world down."

This is drivingly bleak stuff, absolutely fixated on the inevitability of disappointment and death, and viewers averse to melancholy are going to want to dive through their living room windows to get away from it. But what Bodily Harm is reminding you, plainly and humanely, is that there's no real escape. The only message is: be brave. Because what choice have do you have?u

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