By James Walton
Last Updated: 5:59PM GMT 05 Mar 2009

You can understand why Channel 4 hasn’t stinted on the publicity for Red Riding. It’s a hugely ambitious trilogy set in the Yorkshire of the Seventies and Eighties. Each of its two-hour episodes is made by a different bona fide film director. The cast includes Sean Bean, Warren Clarke, David Morrissey and Rebecca Hall. According to one of the writers, the overall plan is to create nothing less than a new TV genre, to be known as ‘Yorkshire noir’. 

The series began with 1974, directed by Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisited). Despite all the advance publicity, it still arrived on screen with an undeniable bang, and has already laid a strong claim to being one of the most darkly powerful dramas of the year. Even so, I can think of several groups who won’t enjoy it much. Among them are anybody with a weak stomach, any retired officers from the West Yorkshire police, and any viewers who’d hoped that these tales of old-school coppers would plunge them back into the cheerfully irreverent world of Life on Mars. 

That cheerfulness, mind you, was never very likely. After all, the series is based on the novels of David Peace, which combine fact, fiction and conspiracy theory to explore the Yorkshire of his childhood. If Peace is to be believed, this was an unrelentingly seedy and corrupt place, where the misdeeds of the police went far beyond giving villains the odd slap � and where all the people with any sort of power swigged their whisky, smoked their fags and plotted their crooked schemes together. As one typically psychotic officer put it last night, “This is the North. We do what we want.” 

In the first episode, what the schemers wanted was a convenient solution to a series of child murders. To this end, the police followed the traditional path of fitting up the local oddball, Michael Myshkin (Daniel Mays), and apparently torturing a confession out of him. As often in Peace’s work, there were deliberate echoes of a real story here: the framing of Stefan Kiszko for the murder of 11-year-old Lesley Molseed in 1975. (Like Kiszko, Myshkin was the son of East European immigrants, and had what in the Seventies were certainly not referred to as ‘special needs’.) The senior officer in the Kiszko case, incidentally, was DCI Dick Holland, who’d go on to investigate the Yorkshire Ripper murders, which feature in the next episode of Red Riding. 

Amidst all the corruption and violence, one Yorkshire Post journalist, Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), did eventually come up with the radical idea of trying to do the right thing,  partly because he fell in love with one of the bereaved mothers, Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall, trying hard but unavailingly not to look too glamorous). Inevitably, however, his new-found righteousness didn’t do him, her or the cause of justice any good. 

Through all of this, Julian Jarrold’s highly atmospheric direction determinedly matched the bleakness of the narrative. As a rule, the relentlessly brown interior shots were broken up only by relentlessly grey exterior ones. The housing estates of Seventies Yorkshire looked alarmingly like Third World shanty towns. 

Meanwhile, the fractured story-telling meant that you had to pay careful attention. Yet even if you did, elements of the plot (the love affair between Eddie and Paula, for instance) remained somewhere between sketchy and inexplicable. In such an avowedly revelatory drama, it was also disappointing that the chief baddie turned out to be John Dawson (Bean), a ruthless property developer from central casting, who announced himself by saying how much he hated black people, gay people, Asians and women. 

But there’s perhaps another problem too. Peace’s own theory is that his mix of history, speculation, reinvention and pure invention allows him to explore different possibilities without arriving at anything as simplistic as a conclusion about what actually happened. But mightn’t this just be a cunning ploy for having his cake and eating it? On the one hand, the apparently factual stuff doesn’t have to be accurate, because this is fiction. On the other, the fiction can gain extra resonance by seeming to be true. Either way, it means you spend quite a lot of time wondering not merely how much of the dark conspiracy stuff is true, but how much is supposed to be. 

Paradoxically enough, though, this ability to make us feel gripped, disorientated and slightly infuriated at the same time only helps Red Riding to achieve its central aim. In the end, the result really is a triumphantly unsettling antidote to everything bland and comfortable on television.