Jimmy McGovern's new 18th century drama Banished (Thursday, BBC2, 9pm) is history with the guts hanging out and blood on its face; it's history that snarls and spits at you; there's no nicey-nicey, flouncy-floucy, may-I-accompany-thee-to-the-ball stuff; all of that nonsense has been stripped out and chucked away.

There are no bonnets. No swirly frocks. No Maggie Smith. No Judi Dench. Just the horrible bits. And it's absolutely wonderful.

It's also exactly what we should expect from Jimmy McGovern, who from his early days on Brookside, has always liked to make us feel uncomfortable - which is a good thing. Far too often, television fails to frighten, provoke or inspire; mostly, it's a form of comfort blanket, patted into place by Ant and Dec and Sir Bruce Forsyth.

Writers like McGovern, thank goodness, pull the comfort blanket away, and in Banished, he does it with great style and dark, intense originality, putting us at the centre of some violent moral dilemmas. It is set in 1788, the year the first British convicts arrived in Australia and follows one small group as they are forced to adjust to life in one of the early penal colonies in New South Wales. They are ruled over there by Admiral Arthur Phillip, who's based on a real historical figure, and a small battalion of soldiers, some of whom are more determined than others to get all they can out of the situation.

As the new colony develops, on the backs of the convicts, the soldiers as well as the prisoners have to live by a terrible series of rules, official and unofficial, rules which are enforced by the whip, the gun and the fist and back the colonists into the darkest corners. The colony's preacher, played with great contained energy by Ewen Bremner, has to decide whether to hang a man who has slept with an unmarried woman, which raises an interesting question: is there a belief you would die for, and is there a belief you would kill for? Meanwhile, one of the convicts, James Freeman (Russell Tovey), must decide whether to report a fellow convict who is stealing his food, or starve to death. "I am either a grass or a corpse," he says.

In the end, Freeman does grass up his fellow convict, but the men who run the camp are not instantly ready to take his side. One of them, Major Ross (Joseph Millson), says a convict struggling to feed himself might be a good thing. "Our problem is too may convicts and not enough food," he says, "one or two of them dying can only help."

That kind of staggering brutality has to be seen in its historical context, but you can't help wondering if McGovern is up to something else with Banished. This is the man who tackled unemployment and domestic abuse in Brookside, crime and punishment in Accused and suicide and drugs in The Street, so why has he chosen to write now about a brutal governing authority clamping down on those who they think deserve to be punished? Why would he be doing that at the end of five years of rule by coalition government imposing austerity? Is it a coincidence? Probably not. McGovern is a subtle, clever writer and historical dramas are never just about then, they are almost always about now too.