There is a lot resting on the BBC’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s trilogy of fantasy novels. As the Corporation face ever-increasing competition from streaming services such as Netflix, so they must deliver bigger and better productions with that all-important wow factor. While His Dark Materials is not, on the basis of the first episode, an all-out extravaganza, it is a fine piece of drama, capturing the strangeness and childlike wonder of the books, but also their rigour and bite. This is intelligent populism writ large.

Jack Thorne’s script is leisurely and so those expecting a kind of quick-fire Harry Potter magic may be disappointed. Yet the pace feels right. This opener slowly draws us into the strange, alternative world not so different from ours where Lyra, an orphan, is given scholastic sanctuary among the bickering dons of Jordan College, Oxford. We learn of Lord Asriel’s fight for academic freedom and of the mysterious substance called “dust” which may or may not be linked to human consciousness.

If this all sounds dizzyingly intellectual, designed to appeal to brainy kids and the sort of people who read Mervyn Peake novels, the hard graft demanded of the viewer is offset by a terrific sense of jeopardy as children start disappearing and Lyra embarks on a mysterious (and we are told) very dangerous quest with the mysterious Mrs Coulter.