They must be tearing their hair out at the Yorkshire Tourist Board. First of all Heartbeat and The Royal are cancelled, two shows that pointed a camera with a rose-tinted lens at the county. And now along comes Red Riding, Channel 4’s trilogy of films based on David Peace’s novels, which hardly paints the place in a friendly light. Hardly paints it in any light at all in fact; this must have been a rare production when good weather would have stopped filming. Except that you don’t get good weather in Yorkshire, of course. It’s grim up north, unremittingly so. Come to Yorkshire, for the relentless rain, and the dark skies, the gloom, and above all for the fear … 

We are in the past, in 1974 in this first one. Rookie reporter Eddie Dunford (excellently played by Andrew Garfield) comes back up north after a failed attempt at making it as a journalist in London. While investigating a series of horrific murders of young girls, he gets caught in a web of corruption surrounding a property developer (even more excellently played by Sean Bean, who has real swagger and menace) and the West Yorkshire police, who are definitely not a force for good. 

If you’re thinking: the 1970s, badly behaved rozzas, leather jackets and Ford Cortinas, hang about, haven’t we done all this recently, then you need to think again. This is Life On Mars for grown-ups. That was more nostalgic, for the music and the clothes; even the corruption was fun. This goes somewhere different. Yes there are some big collars around the place, King Crimson is on the music centre, there’s yet another fine performance from a Vauxhall Viva, a car that looked the same going backwards as it did going forwards. But it’s more than that – they just help in creating a mood.

And the mood is a dark and desperate one. This is a wonderful portrait of brutality and corruption, a huge and unstoppable machine from which there is no escape. 

Where the line between fact and fiction runs is not always clear. By using real events – the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper plays a part in the next one – the writing more than hints at some historical value. I can’t quite believe that the West Yorkshire police were quite so institutionally rotten to the core (Abu Ghraib? Ha! That was preschool compared to what went on in Yorkshire cop shops in the 70s). But whether the torture and terrorism are genuine or not, the characters certainly feel authentic.

As drama then, it works beautifully, and maybe begins to answer a call for a new seriousness in television. Perhaps at last someone is sitting up and taking notice of what’s going on across the Atlantic. And, like the best TV from America – The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men etc – it captures a time and a place. Even the smoking in Red Riding is up there with Mad Men’s. And as this is Yorkshire, it mixes in with the mist coming down from the moors, and the thick fug of cover-ups and corruption … yeah all right, enough of that.

If I have one tiny criticism – and I’m going to find it hard to put my finger on this – it’s that it takes itself a little bit too seriously, tries too hard, almost to the point of self-consciousness. If something is good, it can just be good, rather than jabbing you in the chest and shouting “this is good”, which is kind of the impression I sometimes got during Red Riding. 

Anyway it is good. Very good. And actually I don’t think the Yorkshire Tourist Board needs to worry. In spite of (maybe because of) the murk and the gloom, the concrete car parks and run-down estates, Yorkshire looks amazing – much better than the chocolate-box version in Heartbeat. 

I enjoyed the portrait of Lauren Luke in Natalie Cassidy’s Real Britain (BBC3). Lauren, from South Shields, has become a phenomenon by doing makeup tutorials on YouTube. Now she’s flying to New York, and getting her own cosmetics line, having her teeth fixed and all that. And the big question is whether this will all go to her head, or whether she’ll still be Lauren Luke from South Shields at the end of it all. What they don’t mention in the film – and this is the thing I’d be most worried about – is that Lauren has also got a column in the Guardian. It’s very hard to have one of them and not have an inflated opinion of your own worth, I’ve always found.