Mary and Martha, BBC One

It is now part of the fixtures and fittings on British television. Its original stars, once alternative comedians, have become leathery gerontosaurs of the establishment. And yet on Comic Relief the grammar of giving has been largely immune to evolution. A star – usually a comic - goes out to Africa and reports back from a community in dire need of a basic necessity to alleviate suffering and death. They mug charmingly for the camera, make friends with the children and ask for your money.

It’s a trusted method, but this year Richard Curtis has tried to shake things up a little. Rather than appeal to the audience’s finer feelings through a combination of laughter and facts, Mary and Martha is a work of fiction, and it’s notably light on comic relief. But the real game-changer is that Curtis here tugged on the heart strings by putting his First World characters in the line of fire. 

There were fleeting glimpses of the Curtis who more or less invented the awkward British romcom

The drama told of two mothers united in grief by the dread scythe of malaria, which kills half a million people a year. Wealthy American housewife Mary (Hilary Swank) took her schoolboy son George (Lux Haney-Jardane) out to South Africa for six months to get him away from bullies and computer games. Before long he had been killed by a bite from a mosquito. Although by a neat dramatic sleight of hand we didn't see it happen, the same fate awaited Ben (Sam Claflin), the son of homespun Londoner Martha (Brenda Blethyn), who went off to Mozambique to teach and foolishly handed over his malaria pills to his pupils. In due course the women chanced to meet and, visiting Ben’s old school, found malaria continuing to cut a swathe through his pupils. With not much of a marriage to go home to, Martha stayed on to help, while Mary returned to a large, echoing home fired by the need to intervene in the politics of overseas aid, despite the scepticism of her husband and yoga-mat friends.

Curtis has been this way before. In The Girl in the Café (2005) he came at Third World debt via a love affair between a civil servant and a campaigner. It’s a tricky ridge to traverse: can the film raise awareness and if possible donations while also offering a satisfying story? Even when not delivering a lecture in a dog collar, Curtis for all his undoubted humanity has never been the most layered dramatist. The tears shed by Swank and Blethyn, and the back stories lending their characters a basic sort of substrata, could not quite erase the whiff of the well-meaning infomercial. James Woods as Swank’s unloving, work-obsessed father was a creation of purest cardboard. There were only fleeting glimpses of the Curtis who more or less invented the awkward British romcom. Mary asked Martha why she married her lumpen husband. “Well,” said Blethyn, “he was very polite.”

Mary and Martha was very polite too, even at the moment when the two women fetched up lecturing a congressional committee on funding for disease prevention about the genocidal impact of malaria. Curtis has always expertly manipulated his audience’s emotions – egregiously so in Love, Actually. The oddity is, with director Philip Noyce also pulling the strings, that he managed it all over again. It’s a shrewd calculation: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, where facts won’t get them, fiction must.

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