This is superb Sunday night viewing, and has a highly crafted, sinister, intriguing and, at times, Satanic quality that should keep you enthralled. Strike: Troubled Blood, in other words, is the BBC at its best.

Strike is a slow-moving caper about a lovable curmudgeon that goes down particularly well on a bleak winter night at the end of another testing year. Forget boy wizards and their broomsticks. Strike: Troubled Blood delivered real escapism in magical quantities.

It’s good, competent meat-and-two-veg noir. Some acting on the undercard is a bit teaky, but there are flavoursome cameos.

Troubled Blood’s epic runtime only accentuates the artifice of the pair [Cormoran and Robin] circling longingly, and when romantic developments do haltingly come, they too have the air of a throwback, namely the carefree English romcoms of the 90s. But it’s not enough to distract us from the thought that really, Strike is a Sunday-night detective like all the others.