Recovery, Tony Marchant’s latest effort, goes out on BBC1 on February 25. Following his pretty dismal Family Man, I reckon this is a real return to form. David Tennant plays a – er – family man struggling to come to terms with brain damage following a road accident.

The story, in the main, is told from the point-of-view of his wife (former squeeze Sarah Parish), who now becomes his carer. “I keep looking at people and thinking, ‘Why didn’t it happen to them?’” she says at one point. And it’s heartbreaking stuff, as the couple seek to redefine their relationship, at one stage positing a continued existence as a kind of brother and sister, rather than man and wife. Both leads excel in their roles, Tennant very withdrawn and unresponsive through much of the drama, while Parish is great – she doesn’t just mine every line for sympathy, and finds other cadences to play.

It’s not all perfect, though. That typical Marchant surly teen crops up here, declaring at moments of high emotion, “By the way, my A levels start tomorrow”. Plus, with a tale like this, progression is difficult. To have the brain damage suddenly go away would be stupid… so a hell of a lot of it is more-of-the-same.

Oh, and Who fans note, we get to see Tennant in the nude, having sex and pooing into a bucket. Peter Davison never did that on telly to the best of my knowledge.

Er, yes. And things aren’t about to change with The Family Man, which comes to BBC1 at the end of March. In typical Marchant style, what we’ve got here is a seemingly disparate cast of people, whose lives all overlap on the same Very Important Issue.

At the centre of things is a stiffly coiffured Trevor Eve, the titular “Man” who runs a fertility clinic. Through a series (I originally wrote “serious” there, a telling slip) of laborious staff meetings – partially enlivened by the cast all eating Chinese takeways – Eve and his colleagues painfully hammer out the various ethical issues surrounding the topic, before he unilaterally decides to go ahead with what he considers to be the right course of action, with heavily signposted dramatic fall-out ensuing.

The plot-strands are quite clever, including a typically neat tie-up between two seemingly unrelated characters in episode two (I really should have seen that coming). However the characterisation is painful. Working class types dimly reacting to circumstance, one would-be mother screeching: “It ain’t easy, you know – just to give half your eggs away!”. Meanwhile, Eve and his chums live in a Habitat world, where every meal is taken with a glass of wine and icy teenage kids lord it around the house, punching holes in dad’s sanctimoniousness.

But, it’s got Lee Ross in it and Nick Stringer, so it’s not totally without appeal.

Given my off air copy got chewed up by a defective video recorder some time ago, re-watching the series has been a pleasant if nostalgic experience (oh boy, don’t those typefaces look so ’90s, and watch out for an advertising billboard heralding the arrival of Channel 5). However, with Phil Daniels’ Britpop influenced character left to one side, the drama stands up surprisingly well.

But there were a number of questions that came to mind after watching episode one.

Firstly, is this the last really good thing that Tony Marchant ever wrote? More worryingly is the last ever really good signature piece serial in the mould of the public dramas of GBH and Our Friends in the North? I have a horrible feeling that it is (State of Play and In a Land of Plenty both come close but neither quite manages to capture that sense of epic scale), and telly is a poorer place as a result.

Whilst I suppose it’s good to see the BBC can still show faith in the television scriptwriter as the ultimate authorial voice (there are a couple of Poliakoff dramas scheduled for 2006), there seems to have been a move towards more personally driven narratives. Whether this is the fault of economics or simply that there are no writers out there currently able to bring us 21st century equivalents of Edge of Darkness, it’s difficult to say. Certainly Merchant’s Passer By (2004) was a bit rubbish. Anyway, apparently we’ll be able to see for ourselves later this year with his new drama The Family Man.