TELEVISION / In a state about the world: John Lyttle delivers his verdict on Edward Bond's small-screen debut; plus murder in academe

The name's Bond. Edward Bond. This reminder of name, rank and CV (Saved, The Sea, Bingo) is offered because the playwright's expert brand of coruscating banality has dropped out of sight of late. Not that three one-hour sightings near midnight on BBC2 over the long weekend exactly constitutes an assault on the mainstream. Bond's slashed portraits of life at the bottom of the social heap don't lend themselves to easy viewing; this is, after all, the man who once rattled the tabloids by having a baby stoned to death on stage.

Olly's Prison, an everyday tale of murder, marginalised itself further by returning to conventions of the (idiotically) long- abandoned studio play. The heated mating of Bond's pressure cooker intensity and the format's controlled claustrophobia was ideal. The camera could come close, and closer still, to loquacious, enraged father Mike (Bernard Hill) and enigmatically silent daughter Sheila (Charlotte Coleman) as they executed a grotesque version of 'Tea for Two'. Faces filled the screen to overflowing while Mike, armed with the lethal weapons of monologue and monomania, attempted to bully Sheila into gulping a symbolic cup of char: symbolic of the tired and tidy room, of shabby lives, of long dull days conversing about the weather.

The cliches - 'While you're under my roof, you'll live by my rules' - came thick and fast, as did wheedling, revealing repetition: 'You're not leaving this room till you've drunk that tea' / 'It's only a cup of tea. But I'm going to have it drunk. It's only right' / 'You will drink it. There's got to be some order. We're barricaded in.' They were, too - comfy chairs had been jammed against the doors.

Even after the apparently preordained strangling, Mike, in a moment of black farce, urged the contrary corpse to wet its lips, transporting the beloved back to obedient babyhood with a ghastly simulation of spoon- feeding. The morning after the fright before, even that shock- horror moment is topped: Vera, Hill's clinging downstairs doxy (Mary Jo Randle), came calling and the forgetful killer allowed her entry. She toys with the fatal cup - now as cold as its erstwhile sipper - and fondly imagines the slumped, pasty cadaver to be shagged out from imprudent partying. Those raves can really take it out of you - especially if it's your father who's been doing the raving. Vera offered sympathy, not tea: 'Poor kid. She needs another woman. A man's no use. Don't worry. She can't hear.'

Sheila was gone for ever by the middle of the first episode - how you missed Coleman's flickering eyelids, so much more meaningful than Daddy's thousand words - but her presence haunted Hill and the remaining two nights. She would waft down the corridors of Her Majesty's Prison, as insubstantial and as powerful as perfume, the senselessness of her death mirrored by the inexplicable suicide of Smiler, a young, violent inmate, just two tantalising days away from release. (Ironically, the rope Hill had meant for his exclusive use had found itself another customer during his skip to the loo.) If Mike still couldn't grasp why he had choked the breath from his daughter's oddly unprotesting body, Smiler's mother (Maggie Steed) couldn't believe that the rotten fruit of her womb would opt for noose abuse. She suspected cover-ups, conspiracies, dark deeds.

Actually, so did Bond. As the evenings of virtuoso, concentrated dread wore hypnotically on in long, uninterrupted takes, it became clear that a message was intended. And that message was not concerned with the savage vicissitudes of an arbitrary universe - in which Olly (Richard Graham) couldn't explain why his pal Smiler had removed his eye without benefit of anaesthetic - but with Britain. Or Capitalism. Or the Establishment. Or All Of The Above.

Sheila's shallow boyfriend Frank (George Anton), who on Friday night had beheld her dead and eagerly accepted Mike's flat as a token of something (guilt? repentance? arrogance?), had by Sunday become starkly emblematic: the Cop from Hell, corrupt, corrupting, obsessed. Frank was true evil, not merely because he resembled Jason Donovan - though for many this alone would be enough - but because his actions were mad and deliberate and protected by his uniform. Which he daintily removed before beating up Olly, who assented to the trashing as a quid pro quo before accusing Mike of the battering, thus fulfilling Frank's dream of returning his nemesis to jail and leaving Olly to claim against the Criminal Injuries Board.

The choreographed homo- erotic violence - Olly pressing his bloody, blind face against Frank's groin, groaning, 'No, sir, don't,' in the classic Master- Slave pose - presented problems in itself. Even making allowances for theatricality, Frank's subsequent straight-to- camera soliloquy catapulted the preceding 150 minutes into the realms of the mannered. Worse, it provided Mike with the answer to why he had dunnit. Seems he hadn't been in a state but in a State. Yes, an indifferent society was to blame: 'We're all in prison till it's sorted out.'

Still, how churlish to complain when Olly's Prison also delivered some of the most galvanising writing, acting and direction (Roy Battersby, take a bow) BBC drama has witnessed since The Monocled Mutineer.

Don't Leave Me This Way (Sunday BBC1) was as brashly confident as Olly's Prison was bleakly uncertain. It began at a launch party for a woman who had got on her bike and written a book about it, and it freewheeled downhill from there. Cambridge academics Janet McTeer and Imelda Staunton - not waving but acting - were supposed to be hot sleuths, yet they seldom had a clue. Investigating the death of their acquaintance, sexy Sandra, they stumbled upon toyboys with battery malfunctions, a bear stuffed with cash and an address book that turned out to be the McGuffin. Detective genre devotees had plenty of time to count the coincidences and cliches: death by falling on to the fireplace surround, the murderer crashing on the same road bend as his victim etc. As Staunton said, 'It was like finding yourself in a very bad B-movie.'