There's a television programme being made that offers quite a bit of hope for the future of TV.

It has been filming in and around London in the past few days and stars Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen. With any luck, it is a sign of things to come.

The programme is called The Dresser and it is based on the play of the same name by Ronald Harwood about the relationship between an ageing actor and his personal assistant. It was a hit when first produced in 1980 and three years later was made into a film starring Albert Finney, Tom Courteney and Michael Gough.

The new version, which is being produced by Playground Entertainment, the company behind Wolf Hall, stars Hopkins as the old actor and McKellen as his assistant Norman and it's the first time they have appeared in a TV film together. But what makes The Dresser really unusual is that it's a one-off TV version of a play - something television hasn't been doing for a very long time.

There was a time when plays on television were common. In the 1960s, ITV's Play of the Week was often among the most watched programmes and for 30 years until the 1980s, the BBC showed plays first in the Wednesday Play slot and then as part of the Play for Today series.

The idea of plays on television fell out of favour when producers started to see them as slow and old-fashioned, even though the opposite was true: it was often the TV plays that pushed the boundaries most, as in Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle and Blue Remembered Hills for example. They also inspired new series such as Rumpole of the Bailey and there was a broad range from fantasies to tragedies to comedies such as Abigail's Party.

The fact that the BBC is making The Dresser is a possible sign attitudes are changing but it's also a response to the fact that cinemas have been enjoying success with one-off screenings of live plays. Last year, Gillian Anderson appeared in a stunning version of Streetcar Named Desire, beamed from the National Theatre to hundreds of cinema across the country; and next month, the same will happen with Tom Stoppard's new play The Hard Problem.

Colin Callender, the executive producer of The Dresser, sees his television version of the play as a way for TV to replicate what cinemas have been doing and broadcast versions of great British plays as the playwright originally wrote them. He is also aware that it signals a kind of return to the past for television. "This production is a harking back to the great days of Play for Today," he says.

To prove it, Callender has used the original text rather than the shortened version for the 1983 film, and the cast is the best the West End could gather; as well as McKellen and Hopkins, there are Sarah Lancashire and Edward Fox, who appeared in the film adaptation 30 years ago.

Whether this will lead to more of the same depends partly on how successful it is when it is broadcast later this year, but Callender knows what's at stake. "The single drama is an endangered species in both film and television," he says. Maybe, just maybe, The Dresser could change that.