But of course: this was not 'Born Equal!'. Just sober Born Equal.

And dirty-looking, tortured and often-nasty Robert Carlyle was in it. Actually, it would be wrong to single out any actor. Although it was a very political film, the superb performances and deeply involving, mostly-intertwining, story strands prevented it from becoming bald polemic. It did, however, take about half an hour before you felt you weren't being battered over the head by the 'big message', and suddenly found your heart and gut in a vice.

Without wishing to take up too much space with exposition, I'd say that, for my money, the love scenes between Carlyle (playing, don't you know, a troubled ex-con Scot) and a heavily pregnant Anne-Marie Duff, who meet each other in a refuge for the homeless and running-scared, were some of the most romantic ever (not that I spend money on romance in dingy rooms). The other story that needs to be mentioned, because it clicks in with the Carlyle strand, is the one involving Firth, whose character suffers an onset of middle-class guilt - triggered by the imminent birth of his first child; exacerbated by his empty, flashy lifestyle - which he alleviates by throwing himself into charity work for the homeless.

But just when you think the stories are going to settle into a nice little groove and move along to a happy conclusion, you're confounded. Firth falls back into his comfortable, middle-class world, as if in the previous few days he had suffered a flight of good sense.

Carlyle turns bad and, via a tragic twist of fate, ends up stabbing Firth to death. Firth's child is deprived of a father, and so, in a way, is Duff 's child. The message might have been: just as there's no accounting for individuals, there's no accounting for the chaos that can change lives. But then, you think, all things being equal - meaning as long as the status quo remains - maybe things will work out for the two newborn children, more or less, as they would without tragedy intervening.

In total contrast to Born Equal was Driving Lessons, which was to subtlety what Satan is to Christmas. This was everything the film it was going head-to-head with in the schedules wasn't: melodramatic, brightly lit and starring Julie Walters in one of those 'Look at my acting' performances. It was also terribly clichéd; mugging and ingratiating and trying every trick that this sort of thing usually tries to make you feel good, to the point that it ultimately resembled a Hugh Grant film, even climaxing at a - well, not a school play, but one in a community hall anyway.

The non-story involved Walters, 'playing' (and that, I stress again, is not a strong enough word for it) an out-of-work actress, who employs young Rupert Grint (the onomatopoeically-named guttersnipe from the Harry Potter films) as her teenage man-servant. At one stage she announces she has terminal cancer. "I live every week as if it were my last, " she says. Well that goes some way to explaining the over-acting, you think. Later it emerges she'd made the bit up about the illness. So that's it - she was just being Julie Walters all along.

The very worst part of me looked forward with relish to Shane MacGowan's appearance on The Podge and Rodge Show on Tuesday night, although so brief it was in the end, and so often do we see the former Pogues singer being oblivious on telly these days, that it probably didn't even qualify as a moment of true TV hell. To be honest, it came across as if he thought he'd just woken up after an afternoon nap in his north Tipperary home and got into a short, incoherent dialogue with a figment of his own psyche.

The night so easily could have been saved. After MacGowan had gone, co-presenter Lucy Kennedy mused, "Christmas just wouldn't be the same without hearing 'Fairytale of New York'. Imagine if we got Shane MacGowan to sing it." It turned out to be a cruel tease - instead of the manky-mouthed wonder we got former Yo u ' r e A Star contestant George Murphy (earlier billed as "the goblin-faced northside knacker who stole Luke Kelly's voice") to sing out the credits with 'The Irish Rover' and a pastiche of MacGowan's vocal style.

Ah well. You know what they say: If I should fall from grace with Podge? Reviewed Born Equal, Sunday BBC1 Driving Lessons, Sunday UTV The Podge and Rodge Show, Tuesday, RTة Two