When people think of The Exorcist, William Friedkin's vomit-spattered 1973 hit, the first things that come to mind tend to be the funny voices, levitation, head spinning and pea-soup-spewing of the young Linda Blair, who plays the 12-year-old girl possessed by something nasty.

All that boogie-boogie stuff is fun. What truly haunts you about Friedkin's film isn't the shocks and scares, however, but the drab normality with which he frames them. There's a mundane winter gloom in the little town's shabby streets, and the sad priests patrolling them have the drab horror of living in their faces.

Sky's tingling three-part paranormal chiller The Enfield Haunting isn't The Exorcist but, as Exorcist rip-offs go, it's not bad at all.

As with Friedkin's film, it sprinkles a little "True Story" garnish over the daft proceedings, in this case the then-widely-reported story of an anonymous house in the London of 1977, apparently targeted by a foul-mouthed poltergeist.

In the mid-1970s, with The Exorcist craze at full strength - 1977 saw the release of The Exorcist II, starring Richard Burton in one of the roles he took purely so he could afford to keep drinking - stories like that were all the rage in Britain's school playgrounds. The first neat touch writer Joshua St Johnston applies here is to make the two daughters of the house exactly those kind of kids.

Sharing their cramped bedroom, beneath the gaze of their Starsky & Hutch posters, the older Margaret tells her sister, 11-year-old Janet, goosebumpy urban-legend-style horror stories each night at lights out.

Johnston and Danish director Kristoffer Nyholm (The Killing) have a good sense of this stuff. It's their feel for dim, dull, downbeat domestic 1970s texture that makes The Enfield Haunting - and which gives the shocks, when they come, extra jolt: there's one lovely little fright involving a View-Master, which I enjoyed as much for the Proustian rush as the creepy scare.

There's a contrast with the BBC's 1970s spy throwback, The Game: in that, the period recreation can feel like a carefully dingy fashion photoshoot; here, everything just feels ordinary and right.

Settling into it like a tired man into a well-worn sofa comes Timothy Spall, with a great, rumbling performance as Maurice Grosse, an aging, fledgling spook hunter called to investigate the paranormal activity, and who quickly gets out of his depth. He's soon joined by professional ghostbuster Guy Lyon Playfair (Matthew Macfadyen), an aristocratic celebrity expert in psychic investigation circles, parachuted in like the sceptical Jason King to Grosse's working-class walrus.

The two are great together ­- in the melancholy spirit of The Exorcist's priests, both characters have seen things they wish they hadn't. But it's Spall who steals it, beautifully tender, scared and flummoxed, and warily wanting to believe.

The real double act to watch is the delightful relationship between him and young Eleanor Worthington-Cox, who is fantastic as Janet, the girl the poltergeist targets, and who is soon doing the full Linda Blair.

In the scheme of great British TV ghost stories, The Enfield Haunting doesn't have the piercing starkness, strangeness and ambition of something like The Stone Tape. But seeing Spall and Macfadyen go about their weird work made me think of odd old programmes like that; I had the curious, nostalgic sensation of having stayed up late to watch a programme I wasn't allowed to. It's a shame it's lurking behind the Sky paywall. If it had been on proper telly, everybody would be talking about it at school tomorrow.