Every now and then, British television produces something special, the sort of drama that lodges itself in popular culture for another decade, happily remembered, frequently referenced, until, wham bam, it’s scooped up by the Hollywood big screen, where all that quaintness, that unassuming TV existence, is lost. Not necessarily ruined, but certainly outdated.

I hope that doesn’t happen with Channel 4’s latest offering, the gothic little gem that is Red Riding. Based on David Peace’s quartet of novels, the three-part series is already being given a cinema release in some other countries. Not surprising, since each episode is feature-film length and made by a different director. 

Last night was Julian Jarrold’s inaugural offering, 1974. And, well, what I can I say? It was brilliant: ambitious, enigmatic, so swift on its feet that I suspect a second viewing may be in order. But, my goodness, it was grim: the very antithesis of jolly, credit-crunch escapism. The trilogy is set in the bleak hinterland of an economically-strangled, culturally-marginalised Ripper-era North, and last night’s script was splattered with foul-mouthed machismo, racism and misogyny. 

Our hero was Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), a young reporter with the nickname Scoop. After an unsuccessful stint on Fleet Street, he’d headed home to earn his stripes as a crime reporter on the Yorkshire Post. Cocksure but jaded, he approached the abduction of a local schoolgirl as a routine distraction. Until, that was, she was found dumped in a field, dozens of wounds carved into her body and a pair of swans’ wings stitched into her back.

We watched as Dunford grew increasingly fascinated, and then intimately involved. A trail of police corruption soon ploughed into a fog of arson, torture, blackmail and murder, a fog that didn’t dissipate until the very final scenes. All that was clear was that a wide-boy property developer, John Dawson, had an ominous stranglehold over virtually everyone in the neighbourhood. 

The performances were superb; what would you expect from a cast that boasted David Morrissey and Warren Clarke in supporting roles? Rebecca Hall was delicately feisty as a grieving mother-cum-love interest, and Sean Bean hideously charming as Dawson. But it was Garfield who proved the revelation. He has hitherto been best known for his role as a reformed young offender in Boy A, and his Dunford was pitch-perfect: three parts macho grit, one part boyish frustration. In a production heady with testosterone, he retained the presence of a man twice his slight frame.

And so, one by one, each character’s place in the web became clear, whether they had unwittingly found themselves on the wrong side of Dawson’s vigilantes (in which case they, like Dunford’s friend Barry, were sentenced to death by freakish accident) or whether they were, in fact, collaborators. At the final bloody turn, even our premise was pulped. The girl’s death, naturally, was the work of Dawson, “a private weakness”, but hardly what fuelled his blackmailing, murdering machine (that had more to do with the megabucks shopping centre he planned to build). Dunford still shot him for it, and killed himself, too, driving headlong into a convoy of police cars. 

And then it ended, just like that, a self-contained little trip down Sordid Way, without even a nugget of happy ending to cheer us up, and all I wanted to do was to start all over and watch it again. Indeed, if we get a better TV offering this year, we’ll be lucky, though I very much doubt we will.

Which only served to make Jimmy Doherty in Darwin’s Garden all the more disappointing. There’s been a lot of Darwin about, but why the BBC chose to include this programme in its celebration of the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species remains a mystery. The point, I suppose, was to humanise the great man by re-creating his experiments. So we got Doherty pottering about, collecting seeds and soaking them in hot water. A student of Jamie Oliver’s chummy chat, he seemed a pleasant enough fellow, but it was all a little Blue Peter for me. 

For those who toughed it out, there was some reward, in the form of the first part of Andrew Marr’s considerable Darwin’s Dangerous Idea documentary. From the very beginning, it was everything that Doherty’s programme wasn’t: elegant, exciting, and genuinely informative. 

Marr took us through the turmoil of Darwin’s work, the conflict between his religion and his science, and the dilemmas he faced in publication. There was a tour down the ages, an examination of how his theory has been both hijacked and attacked over the years. There were the Social Darwinists, the nihilists, the Creationists and, finally, poor George Price and his doomed quest to uncover human altruism. We even got a look at his methods (including, delightfully, a scene where Marr compared his own reflection with that of a monkey). It was fascinating, and thoroughly engaging.