Not that luck has anything much to do with it. It’s the work of talented playwright Dominic Mitchell, accomplished TV director Johnny Campbell, and a cast and crew that – judging by episode one – know exactly what they’re doing.

What’s that exactly? Telling a tense, engaging human story about guilt, prejudice and acceptance through allegory. With laughs. And gore. And Kenneth Cranham. Told you it was ace.

Taking a longer perspective than most zombie stories, In the Flesh takes place not 28, but 1400-odd days later. Set four years after an unexplained ‘rising’ brought hordes of brain-munching Rotters out of their graves, it asks what would really happen in the UK once a cure was found. NHS rehabilitation centres, post-death group therapy sessions, and a great deal of resentment on both sides of the life/death divide is its answer.

Our protagonist is repentant revenant Kieren Walker, a Partially Dead Syndrome sufferer attempting to fit back into the family and community that buried him years before. Complicating matters for him is the stubborn anti-PDS sentiment in the isolated village of Roarton, which was left by the government to fend for itself during the rising. Further complicating matters is Kieren’s sister’s allegiance to anti-Rotter vigilante group the Human Volunteer Force, and on top of that, the not-small issue of his suicide.

Thanks to its writer and production team, the world of In the Flesh feels remarkably well-conceived and recognisable. If its make-up and post-uprising story say genre TV, its bleak Northern housing estates and clinical rehab centres say social realism. That the two, along with the script’s warming bolt of contemporary satire, are so well-blended is a credit to its makers.