A television drama producer told me once that I should watch the first two episodes of any series, rather than judging it solely on the opening pilot. She was right. I watched the first of Lessons in Chemistry the other day and it was fine, I liked it, but now I’ve seen the second I’m really into it.

That producer’s point, though, was that so much can happen, so much can change, between the making of the first and second episodes that you only get a sense of the series when it’s properly underway. With Lessons in Chemistry, a mini-series, I’ve seen no difference between the episodes, I’ve just got into the characters more.

I think that producer’s advice applies best to series instead of mini-series. A series is different because even if it ultimately is one story told over seven seasons, any one episode has to stand entirely on its own. Making a good “Previously on…” is an art, but even with that, a series has to keepre-establishing its characters and its format, even if it also gets to change and develop both of those along the way.

All of which is on my mind not because of Lessons in Chemistry from 2023, but from Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels 1970-2009. I’m currently reading the 2009 one, the last before Hill died, and it’s fine. There are 22 novels in the series but by a fortunate chance, I began reading them with the fourth one, An April Shroud.

I can still see me, practically thirty years ago, coming across that novel at some car book sale or something. I bought it solely because as it happens, the TV version had just aired. Retitled An Autumn Shroud to fit the conditions at the time of year it was filmed, Hill’s book had been dramatised by Alan Plater and I wanted to see how he’d done it. The BBC Dalziel and Pascoe series would eventually turn out to run for six years too long, the worth of it dropping like a stone once it had adapted all of the novels to date in 1999, but back around March 1996, it was excellent.

The book was good, too, and so much so that even as I realised it wasn’t the first in the series, I began reading in both directions. I read the book before it and the book after, then the book before that and the book after that.

What I found was that, in my opinion, if I’d started with the first novel I would not have read on. If the one I’m reading now, Midnight Fugue, was the first I’d read, I don’t think I’d read on. For it seems to me that the Dalziel and Pascoe novels are on a bell curve, with the first couple and the last few being okay.

It’s the ones in the middle that are great. Bones and Silence, Recalled to Life, Pictures of Perfection and The Wood Beyond are each deeply absorbing.

So much so that Alan Plater agreed to work on the TV series on condition that when it got that far, he would be the one to dramatise Bones and Silence. He did, too.

Except there was a bit of a bell curve here, too. For some reason, and he either never knew or just never told me, Alan was not the first choice to dramatise Bones and Silence. The producers commissioned someone else and it seemingly went badly, because they then came back to Alan. Watch the episode now on ITVX and you’ll see the screenplay is credited solely to Alan, there’s no trace of whoever else did any previous version.

Only, I don’t actually recommend watching the TV version of Bones and Silence because — this is a technical term — it is utter shite altogether.

Here’s a really tremendous novel dramatised by one of Britain’s finest screenwriters of his day, and it’s unwatchable. Obviously that’s just my opinion, except it isn’t: Alan Plater refused to write for the series after this. I presume whatever the treatment he got was less than happy, I mean there has to have been something going on when he wasn’t the first choice to write it, but this is also a clear case of a director screwing up great material.

I don’t tend to notice directors. I’ve never watched anything because of who directed it, just as I have not once tuned in because of who was acting in a show. But I think directing is similar to writing in that if you notice it, it’s bad. And in this case, it’s truly appalling.

Bones and Silence on TV is not a story, it is a collection of arty shots that make you want to sit the director down and explain that you didn’t want a student’s showreel, you wanted a primetime BBC1 drama. What I remember from the one time I watched it back on its original airing was that it had flashbacks and flashforwards, that when someone mentioned a knife you would get an artistic shot of a knife from some other point in the story.

I just set it running again now to check that bit about the screenplay credit and found myself thinking this isn’t awful, it’s not very good but it isn’t awful, and then there was the murder. A woman is shot in a bedroom and for reasons passing understanding, the one overhead light in the room has somehow been knocked and it is flailing back and forth. Think Callan, if you remember that. Back and forth. Back and forth. With each back and forth it lights up the victim, the apparent murderer, some unknown other character, and the lead, Andy Dalziel, each one in turn.

For one minute and 15 seconds. That damn light, apparently the only illumination despite all the moonlight we’ve just seen outside, that damn light swings back and forth for 75 very tedious seconds. Its swing never shortens by a pixel, and the only reason it isn’t hypnotic is that the editing is so poor that the timing is out and that some swings take longer than others.

So if you came to the TV series and saw this episode first, I’m not 100% convinced you’d stay to the end of even the murder scene, but I am quite sure you’d be unlikely to try another one. Here’s the 10th episode of the show, based on the 11th book in the series, and its pants.

I think I might be on the verge of arguing that you should watch every episode of every thing, which is impossible and would also definitely mean watching a lot of tripe. I know I’m trying to argue that it’s worth giving things a chance, that good drama is so hard to make that any one sample of it isn’t a fair example of a show.

Yet there is so much we can watch now, so much that is so very good. We are definitely in a golden age of television drama, but it’s an age with so many riches that I’m not sure how any one series manages to rise up above the rest.