AT a time when a certain channel looks like downgrading its dramatic output due to cost, along comes Red Riding to show us just how vital good writing is to television.

David Peace is one of the best writers around at the moment, but if it’s laughs you’re after then Red Riding is not for you.

Set in Yorkshire, this first of three screenplays, adapted by Tony Grisoni, dealt with a series of child murders in 1974.

Basically, Yorkshire Post journalist Edward Dunford, brilliant played by the enigmatic Andrew Garfield, becomes far too deeply involved in the story, embarking on an affair with the mother of a victim and stumbling upon the main suspect, a violent property developer portrayed by Sean Bean in suitably terrifying mode.

It’s bleak, bleak stuff and Yorkshire did look bleak back then, with its faded yellow landscape enveloped by smoke, and a daily diet of fake leather sofas, cigarette smoke, threatening subways, multi-storey car parks, police brutality, closing mills, short-time working, power cuts and more smoke, with only Leeds United offering hope. Has anything changed?

Leeds United definitely and, maybe, the smoking, but the weeds still grow through discarded roadside gravel and the subways are still scary.

Red Riding is a real slow burner, the atmosphere, drama and tension gradually building through a skilful use of time, with the director refusing to be pushed into rushing this story along and turning it into a high-speed cop show as is the temptation with much modern television.

There’s a bit of Life On Mars in here, but there’s more grit, more sadness and less comedy, with the bravado button largely switched off.

As it progresses, it becomes more violent and murky and Dunford relays his desire to leave the north as he lies in bed with Paula, the mother of a murdered child.

“We’ve got to get out of this place. We’ve got to get out of Yorkshire.

"They’ve got sunshine down south. They’ve got sea view flats and warm summer breezes. Let’s go there right now and never come back.”

Sounds good . .. too good, for just as there’s hope on the horizon, Paula disappears. Dunford searches for her . . . then we are shown her dead body.

He’s tortured, beaten up and thrown out of a speeding van on to the road and, just when we think it’s all over, in the only part that requires a real leap of the imagination, he takes the ultimate revenge and manufactures what could, extremely loosely, be called a happy ending.

The good news is, if you missed this show, you’ll have no difficulty in catching up as the second of the trilogy takes up the action in the Yorkshire Ripper years of the early 1980s and stars Bolton’s Maxine Peake.

Get the happy pills out.