As a lover of both potty-mouthed satire and knockabout tragicomedy, I’m delighted that Monday promises a healthy portion of each.

Which is the amuse bouche and which the supersized Meal Deal in this upcoming feast I’ll leave to readers to decide. But sometime during business hours tomorrow we’ll find out which of Kate Forbes, Ash Regan and Humza Yousaf is to be the new leader of the SNP and thereby pocket the Bute House master key and First Ministerial smartphone (now Tik Tok-free and with all search histories and WhatsApp messages thoroughly cleansed).

Then, at 9pm, Sky Atlantic airs the first episode of the fourth (and, sadly, final) season of Succession, a multi award-winning black comedy. That’s the potty-mouthed satire, in case you have trouble distinguishing between a television programme about smartly dressed backstabbers and the real-life world of Scottish politics.

If you haven’t been watching, chances are you’ll still recognise the title from the headlines the show generates every award season. It was first broadcast in 2018 and to date has bagged 13 Emmys, five Golden Globes and a pair of BAFTAs – enough for its British writer and creator Jesse Armstrong to use as bookends. Among the tomes he might sandwich between them on his mantlepiece are biographies, mostly the unauthorised sort, of nonagenarian media mogul Rupert Murdoch. It’s his empire and the question of which of his several children will succeed him that inspired the series.

Murdoch, who turned 92 earlier this month, has six children, the youngest being 19 (the second youngest has Tony Blair for a godfather, which is a cross not even the cossetted child of a billionaire should have to bear). But it’s the four oldest – James, Elisabeth, Lachlan and Prudence – who are the media players and who have their direct echoes in Succession.

In Armstrong’s world the Big Dog who will not depart the stage is Dundee-born Logan Roy, played by Dundee-born Brian Cox. His four children are Siobhan (Sarah Snook), Connor (Alan Ruck), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Kendall (Jeremy Strong, pictured below with Snook and Culkin), to which rogue’s gallery you can add Siobhan’s now estranged husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), and hapless Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun).

The Herald:

Greg, Tom and Roman are kind of the fan favourites. They bag the best lines. Cox-as-Logan mostly wanders around telling people to f*** off, with as impressively varied a range of inflection and intonation as you would expect from an actor who is a double Olivier Award winner. Someone with too much time on their hands has even stitched together all the cussing and posted the result on the internet for the world to enjoy. It is, quite literally, a f***fest.

As season three ended the prize at stake was the same as always – ultimate control of Waystar Royco, the company Logan founded way back in the day. Now a business behemoth it still owns newspapers (“legacy media”) but also theme parks and a Fox News-style channel. “Waystar Royco? We do rollercoasters and hate speech,” Roman explains helpfully in one episode.

The company also owns a Scottish football team. In one of the more outlandish scenes, Roman buys Heart Of Midlothian FC for Logan as a birthday present – in error as it turns out because his father’s actually a Hibs fan (odd choice for a Dundonian, whether real or fictional, but there you go).

Season four opens with another of the cringe-making birthday parties which are a Roy speciality. This one is for Logan. He’s on the verge of selling the company to Gojo, run by barefooted tech millionaire Lukas Mattson (Alexander Skarsgård), having closed the legal loophole his children planned to use to veto a move which basically disinherits them. Helping him close said loophole was Tom, who snitched on Siobhan and her siblings in return for (he hopes) a favourable outcome. Favourable to him, that is. Logan now refers to his children collectively as “the rats”.

Meanwhile oldest child Connor is having a tilt at the presidency, as you do, though he’s stuck at one per cent in the ratings. “The fear is it could get squeezed,” he tells Greg at the party. “Squeezed down?” Greg replies. “From one? Cause that’s the lowest number”.

READ MORE: BRIAN COX - MY PICK FOR SNP LEADER

In the soapier dramas about business dynasties you have your heroes and heroines, your villains and chancers. Normally it’s easy to tell them apart. If you’re old enough to remember 1980s smash Dallas you’ll know there was never any doubt JR Ewing was a wrong ’un. In Dynasty it was Alexis Carrington Colby, as played with bitchy relish by the great Joan Collins. It was cartoonish in a way, which was a large part of the appeal, along with the hats and the shoulder pads.

Today, long-running shows centred on family dynasties are more nuanced in their approach to character, and dig deeper into the oeuvre they inhabit. They ask bigger questions. Think of The Crown (not for nothing is the royal family referred to as ‘the Firm’) or Peaky Blinders (like The Crown but with better hats), both built on oodles of research and able to pass comment on real events.

Armstrong’s genius is to mash together both approaches. Succession’s depiction of the upper reaches of the corporate world hits home because it rests on truths, just as its prescient satire is born out of its writer’s eye for his subject. After all this is the guy who wrote In The Loop and Four Lions. But the characters which populate the show also feel like throwbacks to the delicious villains of those lurid 1980s dramas, so unfathomably cruel, utterly monstrous and unbelievably spoilt are they.

How monstrous? Normal celebrities travel in comfort we commoners can’t afford but they’re not averse to getting papped strutting through an airport terminal, kids and nannies in tow. There’s another type, though: the super-rich. They hate being photographed and for them, travelling in comfort means avoiding anything as grubby as a scheduled flight or an airport terminal. Cue Roman’s horrified response when fiscal belt-tightening is mentioned in one episode “Does this mean no more PJ?” he yelps. He means the private jet whose steps he habitually swaggers down before stepping into the blacked-out SUV waiting on the tarmac. That’s how he rolls and that’s the world Armstrong skewers in so riotous and profane a fashion.

On top of that he adds sparkling dialogue at times both witty and surreal – “You create this kind of protective shell, but underneath we’re all just little nudie turtles,” Tom tells Greg in one memorably weird exchange – as well as motive (greed) and method (patricide) which could be lifted straight from Greek myth. The nastier sort.

Of course none of the children is actually going to murder Logan. They’re going to ruin him instead. Or try to. Over the next 10 weeks we’ll see if they manage it. Expect darkness, tumult, betrayal, vicious one-liners and (we are promised) a jaw-dropping denouement as one of the best TV series of the 21st century barrels to a close. The Roy story has to end – but none who bears that surname has any hope of redemption.