Andrew Davies’s six-part adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel Les Misérables (BBC One) begins with an explanatory caption. “After 20 years of war, France is defeated and Napoleon is exiled. A new king is waiting to be crowned. The old order is to be restored. The revolution is to be forgotten. And there are no songs.”

It didn’t really say that last bit. But it could have, because the USP of this version is that it is not the musical that long ago usurped the novel as What We Mean When We Talk About Les Misérables. “Boo!” shouts the half of the country that also likes fancy-dress parties, board games and other terrible, terrible things. “Hurrah!” shout the rest of us.

Even the refuseniks would surely have been rewarded. Starring Dominic West as a toweringly furious Jean Valjean, David Oyelowo as his remorseless nemesis Javert and Lily Collins – who pulls off the feat of making Fantine heartbreakingly naive rather than goppingly stupid – and liberally scattered with further talent (Emma Fielding, for example, was glimpsed as the infant Marius Pontmercy’s nurse), last night’s opening episode was a groaning table of treats – a rich feast with which to end the year and see us into the next. And, while I know it is not the done thing to refer to a person’s age when it is strictly speaking an irrelevance to the task at hand, could we take a moment to tip our hats to Davies who, two years after his War and Peace was broadcast, delivers this unto us, at the age of 82? If Attenborough gets kudos for voicing new nature programmes, we should be able to acknowledge this admiringly, too.

The first episode covered the last year of Valjean’s 19-year sentence breaking rocks in the Toulon penal colony. There is no commutation when he saves the life of a guard crushed by a rockfall (albeit one that Valjean, creature of instinct that he is, caused when the guard enraged him). Rather, as even those of us who have never read the book or seen the musical but have absorbed the story by osmosis will know, the strength he displays in the rescue is only going to come back and bite him on his exceptionally well-muscled bum later. On his eventual release, Javert points out, with no small measure of satisfaction, that the next crime he commits, however minor, will put him back there for life. “You can never win.” Valjean may see battle lines drawn. Viewers see a net beginning to be lightly drawn around the whole.

Meanwhile, the young grisette Fantine and her friends have become enmeshed with a trio of posh boys who promise them the world – gold necklaces, fine clothes, £350m extra a week for the NHS – then bugger off home when they have had enough, careless of the grief, destruction and, in the case of Fantine’s Felix, the daughter they leave behind. Her friends had tried to warn her. “The ground we walk on isn’t solid ground,” says Favourite. “Maybe it isn’t always like that,” says Fantine with the hope that will doom her. “Yes it is,” Favourite says, brutally, accurately. “It is always like that.”

Valjean’s new papers mark him as an ex-convict. He is cheated of pay and is offered shelter, kindness and a chance at redemption by Monseigneur Myriel (Derek Jacobi) before the bitterness at the unfairness of his life consumes him. Valjean – as again, somehow we all know – steals the silverware instead. He is brought back, and Myriel (and coming from a Catholic family, let me tell you this is something we left-footers excel at) heaps coals of fire on his head by pretending to the gendarmes that he gave Valjean the silverware and pressing some silver candlesticks on him before he leaves again.

As Fantine stares out the window of the flat that I doubt Felix has even paid for till the end of the month, holding Cosette and wondering quite what her options are as a young, penniless working-class woman on the streets of 19th-century Paris, Valjean is still struggling with his baser instincts. When a young boy passes him on the road, Valjean steals the 40-sou coin he is carrying. The boy runs off. Valjean repents. A new set of narrative engines fire up, and next week we shall be firmly in the thick of things.

C’est magnifique – and there is no chance of Russell Crowe popping up to sing about stars or runaway carts. Merci, Monsieur Davies. Merci.