It’s good to see that BBC Scotland does not take it cue from the Scottish education system. Undeterred by the fact that Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel Sunset Song was recently dropped as a set text on the Higher English syllabus, last week it broadcast the 1971 television adaptation of this bona fide classic. Coming soon are the sequels that complete A Scots Quair: Cloud Howe and Grey Granite.

This revival is not the result of a fishing expedition through the Beeb’s archives. Timed to mark the 90th anniversary of the author’s death – aged only 34 – the old tapes have been remastered, so that the six-part series is now as fresh-looking as if recently filmed. Adapted by Bill Craig, who was remarkably faithful to Grassic Gibbon’s text, it was the first BBC Scotland drama to be shot in colour. Yet the praise it garnered was less to do with novelty than with the quality of its portrayal of rural Scotland on the eve of World War One.

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So far I’ve only watched the opening episode, but after adjusting to the period feel of the performance, I was hooked. Vivien Heilbron superbly plays young Chris Guthrie, from the Mearns in Aberdeenshire, while a cast of well-kent, faces, among them Roddy McMillan and Paul Young, provides the chorus to her coming of age, from girl to married woman, mother and widow.

As the first scenes unfold, we are immersed in the claustrophobic household of the Guthrie family, ruled by Chris’s domineering and pious farmer father, whose perpetual ill-temper with his children pains her long-suffering mother, who can do little about it. From the start it is evident that this is a tale with many layers:........

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