Gerard Gilbert: At last, a sign that the BBC is serious about producing challenging drama

The decision to commission an Alan Bleasdale drama is a signal that BBC drama supremo Ben Stephenson and BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow are serious in their intention of again making the channel a home to innovative and challenging drama – it's a symbolic reconnection to the supposed golden age of Play for Today and a generation of gifted and troublesome writers such as Bleasdale, Dennis Potter, Troy Kennedy Martin and GF Newman – the last-named currently updating his hugely controversial 1978 series Law and Order.

Bleasdale hasn't worked for the Beeb since The Monocled Mutineer in 1986, his tale of British soldiers in First World War France held up as an example of "left-wing bias" at the Corporation. His Boys from the Blackstuff is rightly seen as the definitive social-realist drama of the early Eighties, while GBH (for Channel 4), was Bleasdale's response to Derek Hatton and Militant Tendency in his home town of Liverpool.

His dramas were immensely popular but the increasingly sensitive relationship between the BBC and the governments of the day made softer options more attractive. In the late Nineties the decision was made to scrap drama on BBC2 and chase ratings with makeover shows, a change that, another beneficiary of the renaissance of drama on the channel, Guy Hibbert, says he dated to Jane Root becoming controller in 1999. "It was a disaster for writers and directors," he told me.

Bleasdale's new drama, Laconia, about a wartime incident, sounds innocuous, although you can never tell with Bleasdale. When he's commissioned to write a six-part drama about the political machinations at the top of a (fictional) state broadcaster in the late Eighties, we will accept that our dissident TV dramatists have come in from the cold.