Last week, expectations for National Anthem were high and the delivered quality disappointing. This week I wasn’t expecting as much and I was pleasantly surprised – until it all went a bit wrong.

15 Million Merits is a world ruled by the entertainment. You don’t pay to watch TV, you pay for the right to stop – using credits generated by endlessly pedalling your way to an electronic nowhere on standing bicycles. People who are too fat, unfit or unhealthy to cycle are dressed in shaming yellow, called pie-apes and endlessly abused in reality and online. Although the boundary between the two is blurred, with most people’s meaningful experiences and relationships taking place through the medium of creepy Wii-alike avatars.

The one way out is to buy a Golden Ticket that gets you a chance on Hot Shot, a talent show whose winners are, supposedly, elevated to an upper echelon of society.

Bing, Psychoville’s Daniel Kaluuya, is a young man with a small fortune in credits, inherited, we learn, from his brother, who becomes infatuated with a fellow cyclist Abby, Downton’s Jessica Brown-Findlay, when he hears her singing in the loo. After a few, non-starter attempts to approach her he admits that he was amazed by her voice.

‘I was only singing so no-one would hear me pee,’ she protests.

He compliments her, she demurs and within a few minutes it has escalated into Bing promising to buy her ticket. He thinks it is only going to cost him 12 million merits, but the tariff has gone up to 15 million. It is almost everything he has, but he has faith in her. Or, at least, a desperate desire for something real in his life.

The only problem is, Hot Shots doesn’t want singers this season. They want porn stars. Sweating under the spotlight, a place she didn’t want to be, Abby is pushed to become one of Judge Wraith’s, Wraith Babes. (For some reason, there is only male porn in this dystopia.)

‘Forget about that shame or whatever. We medicate against that,’ he tells her.

Really? We had to go the nasty sex route again? Must it always be the nasty sex route? So far it is 2 for 2.

The same for making the moral of the story grindingly, desperately, insultingly obvious. Although, I have to admit that it sort of worked this time. I knew what way it was going to go, and I was right, but I still rather enjoyed it.

‘I’d like to hear you talk again.’

Reality TV, the dream of stardom for its own sake instead of for a talent and the fact that we do all watch it – for the failures as much as the success stories – has become such a staple of our society. We don’t just watch it once a week, we vote for it, we watch the xtra shows on the other channels and follow them online and pay to keep them on or get them off.

The horror of 15 Million Merits world was captured neatly and with relative subtlety, the intrusive advertising and the constant presence of the media felt claustrophobic even from this side of the screen. (Usually, I could make a clever comment about how I watching it while on my laptop or iPad, but this week I was actually knitting. So…) One of the best, most distressing, moments in the show is when Bing is trying to escape his tiny, TV walled home and is told that he can’t while the advertisement is on. He can’t even shut his eyes, the walls flashing red and demanding that he ‘resume watching’.

I even liked the ending, cynical and ungenerous as it was. Less the denouement with Bing, and more the moment when we saw the slightly larger cells that could be won. Kaluuya was an appealing, if remote, Bing, and the nameless side-characters we see as half-real life people, in grey and sweat, and half glamourous pixelated avatars, were fun to watch. Brown-Findlay was, perhaps, a little too vulnerable and easily pushed, but it worked well in the part. She is everyone’s victims, even the well-meaning Bing’s.

Still, it would be nice if we could avoid the nasty sex route just once, though. Is that really too much to ask? It is so unnecessary to the story and just smacks of some under-socialised adolescent – much like the one portrayed in 50 Million Merits as a foil to Bing’s reserve – snickering and going ‘that’s what SHE said’. The stories are actually interesting enough on their own, they don’t need to degrade someone/something in order to make their point.

Next week’s instalment looks interesting, exploring the idea of memory and the concept of editing memory (something that we all do anyhow) so please? Can we not degrade anyone for it? Fingers crossed?