Every once in a while, along comes a TV series that’s been so heavily written about, anticipated, talked up, hyped that, when you finally get to sit down and watch it, it can’t but fail to live up to your expectations.

Well, Red Riding is most definitely not one of those. For once, believe the hype: this really is quite unlike anything you’ve seen on British television before. 

What we have here is a trilogy of stand-alone, yet interlocking, films based on David Peace’s quartet of dark and disturbing novels set in Yorkshire during the 1970s and 80s, against a fiction-mingled-with-fact backdrop of civil unrest, the miners’ strike and the Ripper murders. In fact, it’s Peter Sutcliffe’s reign of terror that forms the spine of the second film. 

This first one, 1974 (each of Peace’s novels takes a specific year as its title), featured Andrew Garfield (excellent) as a cocksure young journalist called Eddie Dunford, who returns to a job as a crime reporter with the Yorkshire Post after an unsuccessful spell trying to make it in Fleet Street. 

Violence 

“Didn’t cut it down south, then?” spits the news editor’s spiteful secretary as Eddie walks into the newsroom. That fleeting remark pretty much sets the tone for the callousness and brutality that’s to come. 

Red Riding brilliantly captures the gloom-beneath-the-glam period details of the 70s, from the grey tower blocks and smoke-filled pubs where permanent twilight reigns, right down to the last stitch on the characters’ flared trousers. 

But this is not a warming wallow in nostalgia, like Life on Mars, or the cosy Yorkshire of Heartbeat or Last of the Summer Wine. The Yorkshire of Red Riding is an unflinching vision of hell erupting from the pavements in a fog of racism, misogyny, brutal violence (graphically portrayed) and murder. 

It’s a northern netherworld, where the rules of the wider world don’t apply, populated by corrupt local politicians, compliant newspapermen, crooked developers and bent coppers who scream: “This is the North — we do what we want!” while beating Eddie to a pulp, not once but three times. 

Eddie’s descent into hell begins when the body of a 10-year-old girl who has been, as one character puts it, “tortured, raped and strangled, in that order”, is found on a building site belonging to a sinister property magnate called Dawson — terrifyingly well played by Sean Bean — who zooms around in his Jag spouting vile, proto-Thatcherite invective about “wogs, niggers and women”. 

The child has been further violated by having swan’s wings sewn on to her back. As Eddie delves into the history of other little girls who have gone missing over the years, he begins to think it’s the work of a serial killer. 

No one wants to listen, other than his friend and fellow reporter Barry, who claims to have uncovered a web of corruption. Barry also believes that someone, probably Dawson, is trying to have him killed. 

Eddie dismisses Barry as a “paranoid piss-head”, until Barry turns up dead, decapitated in a car “accident” when a sheet of plate glass supposedly slid off the back of a van and through his windscreen. 

Eddie discovers, too late, that the web of corruption is very real and that he’s the fly caught in its centre. 

Red Riding is both a superb noir thriller, brilliantly written, filmed, acted and directed, and a nightmarish portrayal of a society feasting on its own soul. Do not miss the rest.

STACEY’S STARS 
Red Riding * * * * *