YOU are about to see the best acting performance on television in recent weeks (not counting, of course, Holly Willoughby’s delivery on This Morning.)

Sharon Horgan has always been a terrific comedy performer. The writer, actor and comedy star brought us the likes of Pulling and Catastrophe. But now the Irish star offers up some quite brilliant drama in Best Interests (BBC1, Monday, 9pm).

Horgan plays Nicci alongside Michael Sheen’s Andrew, the parents of Marnie who has a rare form of congenital muscular dystrophy.

The storyline, which Horgan herself describes as ‘brutal’, begins with the couple entering a courtroom separately. Nicci doesn’t agree with the medical advice to switch off life support, while Andrew takes the alternate view.

This drama by Jack Thorne, who adapted His Dark Materials, reflects the real-life agony of parents in similar circumstances, capturing perfectly the grief of a couple waiting for a child to die. Not since Peter Nicols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg has such a story been told so powerfully.

And such is Horgan’s expectation-defying performance you will immediately forget to expect a biting one-liner, or a ludicrously honest comedic sneer.

This four-parter is all drama. All about surrendering to the inevitable. Which is the most difficult challenge any of us will have to face.

Bobby Carlyle also defies expectation this week when he appears in a new television series of The Full Monty. (Disney+ from Wednesday). Just has Harry Potter has been turned into telly so too has Monty, the 26-year-old film featuring Simon Beaufoy’s story of desperate ex-steelworkers who stripped to survive.

Can/should the characters from a much-loved film (the low budget movie became the highest-grossing film in the history of British cinema) have been exhumed from the hallowed burial ground that is Prime Video content and recreated in serial form?

Beaufoy was asked to create The Full Monty 2 many times, but resisted, given it would be impossible to produce such a spectacular ending. But he clearly felt there was great mileage in returning to characters who helped make the film such a success.

And he has evidence to argue his case. Britain still has to contend with endemic poverty. There may be many more jobs available than there were when the Full Monty film was made, but they are all too often based on zero hours contracts.

What gave the original film such impetus was a starting point of despair and an end point of hope, the stage strip show being a metaphor for realising that anything is possible. Without that, the series has had to shift focus.

We see the same band of brothers (minus Hugo Speers, who was dropped during filming) navigate Sheffield’s crumbling healthcare and education systems. And the focus is very much on Carlyle’s character Gaz’s relationship with his teenage daughter, Destiny (Talitha Wing).

Does it work as a comedy-drama? Beaufoy is too good a writer not to make it succeed and Bobby Carlyle too compelling an actor not to draw us in.

It is also impossible not to be drawn in by Sarah Beeny vs Cancer (Channel 4, Monday). Beeny has long been an improver, renovating homes, erecting new builds, teaching us how to structure defences against life’s financial traps.

Now, we’re seeing the presenter trying hard to re-build her own body.

Beeny has been devastated by breast cancer, the illness that took the life of her mum when she was 39. Now, we learn that Beeny feared the arrival of cancer since she was a 10-year-old girl, awaiting the time when the illness would take her.

But it hasn’t. And now we get to gain a glimpse of not only Sarah Beeny’s resolve to stay alive, but her boldness in allowing cameras to go on her journey. Beeny talks about her double mastectomy, about her sons shaving her head, defiantly, rather than wait for the chemo effects to take hold.

And so, we learn that Sarah Beeny, while facing her greatest challenge ever, is still a hugely positive person. Determined. Courageous. She underlines point that breast cancer survival rates have doubled in the past 50 years.

She’s still about building. Now, she’s reconstructing her own body. And assembling a platform for hope. And she challenges us to believe that medicine has progressed to the point where sufferers don’t always end up like her mother.

Covid was a challenge, wasn’t it? But thankfully television was a great rescuer, offering up a shared experience we craved. Perhaps one of the best examples was Staged (BBC1, Wednesday) the comedy which features the comic exchanges between Zoomers David Tennant and Martin Sheen.

We’re no longer in lockdown, but we’re still in need of laughs, and what better to laugh at than heightened egos swelling to the size of the very room they occupy.