The season of glossy, dark autumnal treats is upon us. Conkers. Hot toddies. Meaty stews. And proper dramas on TV. The BBC has gathered up its money and its writerly and actorly talent and poured it all into London Spy (BBC2), an unutterably delicious, satisfying dish served up over the next five weeks in portions you will wish to savour.

Ben Whishaw plays Danny, a lonely hedonist who bumps into a handsome jogger the morning after another disaffected night before and experiences something of a coup de foudre. The series is billed as an espionage thriller, but most of this first episode is about the unfolding, in heartbreakingly slow and tender fashion, of their love story.

Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent on London Spy: ‘It’s not a gay story. It’s about guys who happen to be gay’ Read more

The great dramatic problem of our age is how to keep people apart. How to infuse such stories with tension. There are so few credible barriers to togetherness any more. You want to have sex? Have sex. You want to leave your wife/husband/children/job/life? You can, and people do, with nary a thought for the poor dramatist who is suddenly bereft of conflicts, frustration, anticipation, yearning and all the other things we long for in our hearts and our stories. London Spy solves this brilliantly and believably by having Alex (the jogger, played by Edward Holcroft) be an investment banker, a genius with numbers and child prodigy who went to university at 15 and has all his life been slightly out of step with everyone else. Danny is his first sexual partner, his first boyfriend, his first everything. “How do you admit you’ve never been in a relationship?” he replies when Danny wonders how he reached this point. “And when you do, who wants to stay?”

Danny does, and for a while the two are blissfully happy. It becomes clear-ish that Alex is not an investment banker and that he gives away little of himself, apart from the fact that his parents are dead, but Danny is not the kind to worry about details. Scottie (Jim Broadbent, in fully teddy-bear-carrying-a-switchblade mode), who works in Whitehall and stands in loco parentis to and in unrequited love with Danny, harangues him brutally but Alex does not flinch. However much love he is capable of, it has found its home in Danny.

Alex suddenly disappears. Danny blames himself for telling Alex about his darkest time, from which Scottie saved him, but when someone mysteriously furnishes him with the keys to Alex’s flat Danny finds in the loft an array of S&M equipment, a laptop and a trunk, the last of which contains a dead body which may or may not be Alex. He smuggles a key hidden in the laptop out after calling the police – who discover that Alex is not Alex but a man called Alistair whose parents are definitely not dead and who is definitely not an investment banker. Scottie’s Whitehall-honed instincts say that he is very definitely a spy.

The thriller has begun and no doubt will be as rich and rewarding in its own way as the love story, courtesy of a script from Tom Rob Smith that I’m sure will remain as handsome and elliptical as Alex and as tender and compelling as Whishaw, who remains the most powerful actor ever made out of thistledown and magic. But the love story was beautiful and I hope it returns.

***

The Rise of Female Violence (BBC3) presented by Alys Harte was a strange mixture. The first three quarters were spent on a couple of case studies – one of the woman whose multiple convictions for things done when drunk include abusing feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez online, two of violent teenagers who had become so after violent experiences in the home and elsewhere. There was no evidence proffered of an actual rise in female violence (nor, beyond a few gestures, of the possible causes of current levels) until the final 15 minutes when we were assured that “there is a slow upward trend in girl crime … women are being arrested for a greater proportion of violent crimes” and heard the testimony of two current girl gang members about their activities, which was shocking for sure, but not insightful or probative in any meaningful sense.

Still, I suppose if we haven’t yet worked out why men have been committing the vast proportion of violent crime since time began, we’re not going to explain women’s fractional contribution just yet either. Discuss, animatedly, over a pint. Then don’t go out and stab someone, whatever genital configuration you sport, there’s a love.