CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews the weekend's TV: Every scene verges on panic in this tense vision of a gambler's hell

The Cage (BBC1)

Rating:

Better than sex. That's what an old sub-editor used to claim, as he eyed the one-armed bandit in the corner of the pub, on our break during the evening shift.

I could never fathom the attraction of that demented robotic contraption. If you have to throw your money away, at least the jukebox gives you a song.

But this white-haired journo would down his pint and make tense small talk for a few minutes every night before heading across to do battle with the bars, bells, oranges and cherries.

I hadn't thought of him in years, until Michael Socha's twitching, sweating performance as gambling addict Matty in The Cage.

With one foot drumming on the floor, all his attention was consumed by the fruit machine beside the counter of a grotty Merseyside cafe.

He couldn't eat his sausage-and-ketchup sandwich, much less listen to what his colleague Leanne (Sheridan Smith) was telling him, until another customer scooped the jackpot. Once the money was gone, Matty could relax.

Casino manager Matty is a mess. He sleeps in his office at The Envoy club, drinking himself unconscious and swigging from a stale bottle when he wakes.

He owes £16,500 to a money lender, he can't pay the monthly maintenance for his teenage daughter, and a violent mate is forcing him to look after a bagful of cocaine . . . which he has lost.

Apart from that, everything in his life is going swimmingly.

Writer Tony Schumacher conjures the same sense of a world on the skids that he did in his Scouse police drama, The Responder, which starred Martin Freeman.

Every scene is fuelled with a noisy urgency that is verging on panic. His characters want to save themselves. They are not inherently bad people — they care, they love, they hope. 

But they can't catch a break, because in this crime-ridden netherworld, poisoned by drugs, the only breaks are broken bones.

In a succession of dramas where she's in freefall and clawing at the air, Sheridan Smith has perfected her desperate smile. 

The more she beams, the worse she's feeling. The cage of the title is where she works, behind security bars in the club. But it's also a description of her life. 

She's looking after her grandmother (Geraldine James), who has dementia. Without gran, Leanne and her children will be homeless.

Still, it was a shock to read her thoughts as she stood on the rooftop of a multi-storey carpark and screamed. A woman collecting her car asked if she was OK.

'I've got kids,' Leanne answered, as if that were the only thing holding her back.

When she and Matty hatch a plan to relieve the casino of some of its excess profits, it's impossible not to sympathise. 'There's no way we'll get caught . . . Absolutely no way on earth,' they agree, and they believe this about as much as we do.