If there is a certain irony in the same actor playing Michael Collins and Winston Churchill, it ought to be remembered that the two warriors had a sneaking regard for one another. When they faced each other across the conference table at the contentious and bad-tempered Anglo-Irish Treaty talks in 1921, Churchill warmed to Collins and the two corresponded afterwards. Brendan Gleeson memorably portrayed Collins in the 1991 TV film The Treaty, and now he embodies the equally formidable personage of Winston Churchill in this HBO/BBC co-production, Into the Storm.

A sequel to the acclaimed 2002 TV film The Gathering Storm, which starred Albert Finney as Churchill, Into the Storm was shown to great acclaim in the US earlier this year, and Gleeson won an Emmy for his performance. And deservedly so, because he's quite brilliant as Britain's dogged wartime leader. Directed by fellow-Irishman Thaddeus O'Sullivan, Gleeson has admitted that he was initially uncomfortable about playing a man who has not always been viewed kindly by his countrymen.

But, ultimately, he was won over by Churchill's mercurial and complex character. "What Churchill did in the Second World War was remarkable," he has said. "His maverick qualities, his self-confidence appealed to me. Somebody once said that when you first meet Winston, you're aware of his faults -- and you spend the rest of your life discovering his virtues." And Gleeson's nuanced and subtle performance teases out the contradictory character of this extraordinary man.

With shaved head and exaggerated paunch, Gleeson is cunningly filmed to de-emphasise his height (he's six-foot-two; Churchill was five-foot-six), but more interesting than that is the skill with which he embodies the curmudgeonly but inspiring leader. Not only is his accent impeccably clipped, but he perfectly conveys the mix of recklessness, arrogance and bulldog cussedness that made Winston Churchill the right man to lead Britain through its darkest hour.

If the Second World War needed Winston Churchill, he needed it just as badly. Throughout his life, Winston's fascination with war had landed him in trouble, and his Dardanelles masterplan that led to the disaster of Gallipoli in 1915 almost ended his political career. He spent most of the inter-war years in the political wilderness, and it was only when war with Hitler became inevitable that he drifted back towards the centre of power. He had been one of Neville Chamberlain's most implacable critics and, when the appeaser resigned in 1940, King George VI turned to Churchill to lead his government.

The King had been wisely advised, because Churchill would prove the right man for a seemingly impossible task. As Into the Storm demonstrates, he had the ruthlessness a wartime leader needs, but also the ability to inspire. When the British Expeditionary Force was trapped on the French coast after the fall of Calais in 1940, he pragmatically mutters to one of his aides, "wounded men to be evacuated last".

And he had absolutely no hesitation about destroying the French fleet off the Algerian coast once the Vichy government had signed a treaty with Germany.

A peerless spin doctor, he used rhetoric to turn the evacuation at Dunkirk into a victory of sorts, but to his cabinet he was more realistic -- "wars," he commented, "are not won by evacuations". Once the Blitz started, it was his extraordinary, almost matter-of-factly bullish speeches that helped keep the British people going through unimaginable hardships, and he composed them himself, as the film makes clear.

At one point, Winston is visiting an RAF airfield in Kent when the order comes to scramble. And as he watches the Spitfires and Hurricanes taking off, he comments, "they're so young, and there are so few of them. Never in history have so many owed so much to so few". Then, impressed with his own eloquence, he asks an aide to take a note. "We might use that," he says.

Churchill might have been fascinated with war, but he was not insensible to the suffering it created around him. During bombing raids he would sometimes head not for the safety of the underground shelter, but to the roof of 10 Downing Street to watch the fires rage across the city. He would get his revenge later in the war, and at one point in Into the Storm his ruthless RAF commander Bomber Harris is stopped by a policeman for speeding. When the policeman says: "You might have killed someone," Harris breezily replies, "My dear fellow, I kill thousands of people every night!"

The film, in general, handles Churchill's supporting cast excellently. Iain Glen is King George, and Patrick Malahide is excellent as the impossible and obnoxious Major-General Bernard Montgomery, whose obtuse single-mindedness must have struck a chord with Churchill. When Monty makes histrionic demands to his leader, Churchill agrees then decides it's time for lunch. "I'm sure you could do with a drink," he says to the soldier. "I neither drink nor smoke and am 100pc fit," says Monty. "I both drink and smoke and I'm 200pc fit," Churchill replies.

The great man must have had an extraordinary constitution, because he drank Champagne and brandy like they were going out of fashion. His reputation as a toper preceeds him to Washington, where Franklin D Roosevelt is prevaricating about his attitude to the war. When an advisor remarks to the president that the former Ambassador to London, Joe Kennedy, had described Churchill as "a bully, a warmonger and a drunk", FDR replies: "He may be a drunk, he may be a warmonger, but he's certainly a fighter." The relationship between these two leaders would be crucial to the Allied victory that saved Europe from fascism.

For all its history, though, Into the Storm ultimately concentrates on the sacrifices those around Churchill had to make while he was saving his nation. Janet McTeer plays Clemmie Churchill, his devoted wife who emerges as something of a saint, because Winston could be pretty hard work to live with, and downright impossible when he didn't get his way.

Clemmie, in fact, is the only one who'll stand up to him, and tells him bluntly when she thinks he's in the wrong. She upbraids him for taking out his geo-political problems on the servants, and shushes him when he talks his way through a film screening the couple give for their guests. And yet he was totally devoted to Clemmie, and the couple corresponded feverishly whenever they were separated.

Into the Storm's action is framed by a family holiday in Bordeaux just after the war, as Churchill stalks a country chateau in foul temper as the British public go to the polls to elect a post-war government. Churchill had led his people brilliantly through the gravest-ever threat to their existence, yet the British voters, perhaps wisely, decided he wasn't the man for peacetime problems and elected a labour government instead.

Churchill was devastated. After years at the dead centre of international politics, he'd been sidelined by the Russians and Americans, and now by his own people. He rallied of course, and in the 50s, at the age of 77, he returned to Downing Street at the head of a Conservative government. But as it turned out, peace indeed did not suit his bellicose temperament, and he retired from politics after resigning from government in 1955.

When he died, at the age of 90, in January 1965, he lay in state for three days at St Paul's Cathedral. And as his coffin passed down the Thames by boat, dockers on the shore lowered their crane jibs in a strangely moving tribute.

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Into the Storm screens this Monday at 8.30pm on BBC2

- Paul Whitington

Irish Independent