Welcome to Lost and Found, The Student's weekly tour through TV that you probably haven't seen before, but should see straight away. Because we say so. We'll bring you TV from before you were born, from far-flung lands or shows that simply have slipped beneath most people's radar.

From House of Cards to State of Play and Spooks, Britain has a long tradition of TV dramas that take us into the corridors of powerm making us wonder how much we ever really know about what our elected leaders get up to and whether what is being done in our name is really in our interests.

One of the best is the TV adapation of the novel A Very British Coup, helped along not only by brilliant lead actor Ray MacAnally but also by the fact that it is based on a real series of events.

MacAnally plays hard left Labour leader and former steelworker Harry Perkins (based loosely on Prime Minister Harold Wilson) who is swept into Downing Street on a radical socialist manifesto of nationalisation and unilateral nuclear disarmament after the public turned against the previous government for not facing up to shady practices in City financial institutions – a prophetic vision that will appeal even more to audiences now than it did in 1988.

The powers that be, however, soon conspire to overthrow Perkins, threatening as he does everything they stand for. The mass media – in the form of Robert Murdoch clone George Fison, the civil service, army, MI5 and the CIA, all club together to undermine Perkins' government, manufacturing civil unrest and murdering one of his closest advisors.

Keith Allen turns in a brilliant performance as No.10 press secretary Fred Thompson, while Tim McInnerny (Blackadder, Spooks) is perfect as a  sinister, ruthless MI5 agent.

The final scenes show military helicopters landing outside Perkins' home – implying that they are prepared to kill him before he reveals the plot and alluding to the military coup rumoured to have been planned to overthrow Harold Wilson in the mid-1970s.  Taut, unnerving and always pressing us to think twice about who really holds power, A Very British Coup is the gold standard of political thrillers and the pattern for the genre for the next two decades.