Yes, there are times when Mercurio seems to want to be David Simon just a little too much – I'm going to put the line about "coming at the king" down to Lennie James' Tony Gates being a massive Omar fan in his secret inner life – but this first episode was taut, tightly scripted and well acted all round.

It’s a little like “The Shield,” the FX show that starred Michael Chiklis as a corrupt cop, but it’s a lot more like “Spiral,” the sleek French crime series on Netflix that has a cult following in Britain and the United States. So basically, “Line of Duty” is the opposite of “Downton Abbey,” except in certain elemental ways: an excellent cast, skillful writing and a knack for making an exotic, unfamiliar world seem like the viewer’s second home.

Line Of Duty makes an excellent effort at modern British life. It does fall short in places, but I give it a lot of credit for trying.

I want to see what happens next to DC Gates. Lennie James brilliantly captured the odious ambiguity of his character: a man who is part hero, part the sort of person who looks at a crime scene littered with dismembered body parts and concludes “it’s big, it’s sexy, and that makes it mine”.