KEY POINTS:
In A culture where poverty seems to be regarded more and more as a badge of laziness and carelessness, it is not often we are reminded that good fortune, even for the enterprising individual, is still largely an accident of birth.
Last night's Sunday Theatre, Born Equal (TV One, 8.30), was a rare plea for compassion for the disadvantaged, a modern morality tale about ignoring the vulnerable and those in grinding need in the midst of consumer riches.
This bleak, polemical BBC drama about the homeless in London screened in the conscience-provoking season of goodwill in Britain but there was no redemption or Christmas cheer on offer for any of its characters.
Made in the school of realism and improvisation pioneered by Ken Loach, Born Equal followed the misfortunes of a clutch of people washed up in an emergency housing hostel.
There was Robert (played by Robert Carlyle), a newly released con searching for his mother, and Michelle, a heavily pregnant woman with a young daughter fleeing a violent marriage. Other strands in the tale were occupied by a Nigerian family of political refugees and a runaway teenage girl. Into this morass of misery blundered Mark (Colin Firth), a wealthy dad-to-be suffering a middle-age crisis and an unlikely attack of the guilts over the down-and-outs he passes on his way to his gilt-edged job in the City.
The amateur do-gooder is a dangerous beast, so it was no surprise Mark's clumsy foray into charity work would end in disaster.
The strength of the cast managed to keep this drama afloat for a while. Anne-Marie Duff squeezed an amazingly rounded performance out of Michelle's slender plotline, while Carlyle proved yet again he is a master at playing the human piece of flotsam on a knife edge.
Firth's Mark, who cruelly discarded the homeless teenage girl he had tried to help when things got complicated, was a gratifying antidote to his famous Mr Romantic roles.
But even such talented actors couldn't save this drama from its implausibilities. Surely a City financier would get his PA to find some way he could salve his social conscience?
Equally unconvincing was Robert's ditching his relationship with Michelle when he learned his mum died while he was in prison - all the more reason, you would think, for him to cling on tighter.
The ending, with Robert fatally crossing paths with Mark, was so overly dramatic it blew all that carefully constructed "authenticity" out of the water.
Born Equal ended up being not so much hard-hitting as heavy-handed: Robert counted out his few coins to see if he could afford a meal; cut to Mark and his buddies downing expensive shots of cognac in a bar. While the Nigerian maid sweated over where to get her hands on £5000 for the visa to save her father-in-law's life, her employer swanned past with an outfit and handbag that probably cost at least that much.
And Robert's brutal murder of Mark muddled the message. In the final scenes the camera lingered on Mark's lonely widow and his newborn baby, a poor little rich kid deprived of a dad and, it seemed, a lesson to the comfortable why charity should not begin with the homeless.
