The writers, Ben Court and Caroline Ip, did not stop their challenge to exhausted convention there. Although Mayday was a murder mystery, they ignored the detective format. The police barely featured. Instead, the wives of the suspected men worked out the truth for themselves. Leslie Manville was superb as a nervy, birdlike middle-aged woman who slowly realised that her husband was a paedophile and a fraud. Sophie Okonedo was as good as I have ever seen her as the wife of the police officer who killed the girl. The look of hard determination on her face as she decided to save her family by framing an innocent if repellent man was convincing and quietly terrifying. Court and Ip decided to resolve the drama by using magic rather than police work. Evidence against the framed man vanished from the police station. The murdered girl came back to life through her twin sister and terrified her killer, who thought he had escaped justice.

It sounds silly when I write it out. But the director Brian Welsh had made the Sussex woods look so eerie and built the atmosphere of ancient paganism surviving into the modern day so well that the apparently tricksy finale worked. In its willingness to experiment, Mayday showed that the sickly body of British television drama retains a flicker of a pulse. To restore the patient to health we need to recognise that in broadcasting as in so many other walks of national life, managers hold us down. To get back on our feet we must get them off our backs.