It’s sadly possible to imagine that The Living and the Dead was sold to BBC1’s commissioning editors as ‘Poldark meets The Exorcist’. Yet, while that wouldn’t be a completely inaccurate summary, the overall result is a lot more coherent, clever and ambitious than that.

At heart, in fact, Tuesday’s first episode was a nifty twist on another genre: the one where a retired detective/gunslinger/master criminal comes out of retirement for one last job.