Anjelica Huston

Coincidentally, two of this week’s big new dramas began with a fourth wall-busting declaration of their narrative methods. At the start of Towards Zero, BBC1’s latest Agatha Christie adaptation, a man we later discovered to be a lawyer addressed the camera. ‘I like a good detective story,’ he told us. ‘But they begin in the wrong place. They begin with the murder’ – which should instead ‘come at the end of a long chain of cause and effect’. Get Millie Black opened with a voice-over explaining that ‘This is just another story about Jamaica… But like all stories in this country, it’s a ghost story’. As it transpired, both programmes followed their own prescripts – but in one case, with distinctly mixed results.

As we wander our way through life, we encounter all manner of guilty pleasures. Some — say, watching reality television or consuming fast food — can be said to properly induce feelings of guilt, but many others really ought to make no claim on our conscience. Surely the least guilty of all guilty pleasures is the cinematic subgenre known as the inspirational sports movie. This perfectly respectable form has spawned countless enduring films, from National Velvet to Rocky. Their makers recognized that few things rouse an audience like the spectacle of an underdog mastering an athletic pursuit. With the 1986 release of Hoosiers, filmmaker David Anspaugh presented himself as the most gifted modern practitioner of the form.