Midwinter Of The Spirit

9pm, STV

Amid all the other anniversaries with which we’ve been getting bombarded, it was beginning to look worryingly as though one extremely important date in TV history was going to be overlooked: November 2015 marks seven years since Martin Shaw went completely off the reservation railway and forced the BBC to make Apparitions, the insane prime-time entertainment in which he played a sexy exorcist priest battling hell’s demons, while various character actors sat around in clouds of flies, bleeding from their eyes, and talking about sticking crucifixes “up nuns”.

Clearly, this was good stuff, and not simply because it was the closest British TV had come to broadcasting a full fledged nervous breakdown in fun weekly instalments since the series of Police Camera Action that we don’t like to talk about in 2002.

As numerologists know, seven is one of the special ones, and I can’t have been alone in restlessly scanning the TV listings, searching for programming commemorating the dark 2008 Shawpocalypse. I thought we were getting it when Sky rolled out its own recent Exorcist rip-off, The Enfield Haunting. But, compared with Apparitions, that series seemed, disappointingly, like a work of restrained genius and shrewd wit. Although, then again, so did the old Professionals episode that guest-starred Trigger from Only Fools And Horses as an international assassin in a Rolling Stones wig.

Finally, though, we’re getting the real deal. For everyone who has been missing Wednesday night dramas in which hitherto well-respected actors wear dog collars while declaiming dialogue like “A crow sacrifice is deep, it is DEEP in symbolic meaning”, ITV’s Midwinter Of The Spirit is the answer to your prayers.

It doesn’t go the full Shaw – what could? – but I cherish this three-part series for several reasons, not least the title, which I like to imagine Peter Cook and Dudley Moore repeating in the pub.

Dressed as a vicar this time comes Anna Maxwell Martin, who plays Merrily Watkins, a Church of England priest who has just commenced secret exorcist training, courtesy of super-exorcist Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) – just in time, as it happens, because a Satanist cabal is at work in her humdrum new country parish, subtly announcing itself by crucifying a teacher down the woods, an act that cruelly leaves the programme’s writer scrabbling for ways to go up from there. Elsewhere, among a lively cast come David Sterne, who craftily plays a suicidal canon plagued by Satan’s agents exactly the same way he played the mad farmer with invisible dogs in Detectorists; and the great Siobhan Finneran, a strong contender for this year’s BAFTA for Best Character Introduced Hiding In A Public Toilet With Tarot Cards.

The finest scenes, though, are between Martin and Threlfall. Martin, as ever, is fully believable. As the shades of Hades flicker around Merrily, it’s astonishing how she manages so convincingly to convey anxiety, dread, conflicted emotions and deep despair. I suspect it is some Stanislavskian sense-memory Method technique: she is reliving the same sensations she experienced when she first read the script at her kitchen table.

Threlfall isn’t in it enough, but compensates by attacking his role in the style of John Cooper Clarke doing a parody of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Best of all, late in episode two, there comes a David Threlfall Monster: a slimy, hairy, half-naked satyr on hooves, that resembles a disconcerting cross between Iggy Pop and Jeremy Hillary Boob from The Yellow Submarine. Somewhere, Martin Shaw is smiling: his work here is accomplished.