The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes; no Tom Hollander for the comedy scenes; and no Hugh Laurie for the evil-kingpin-in-his-toothsome-mountaintop-lair scenes, I nearly claimed.

But only because at the very beginning of the new season the Laurie character’s grizzled body is identified by Olivia Colman (in her most irritating performance ever, as a dowdy but capable MI6 officer with a gratingly suburban accent). And I didn’t want to spoil the coming plot twist in case any of you were foolish enough to have fallen for this blatant case of Chekhov’s misidentified corpse.

Now the cat’s out of the bag in all the papers, though, I might as well acknowledge that Laurie makes a surprise reappearance at the end of episode three. Let’s hope he can inject a bit of excitement into the series.

So far I don’t feel as if I’ve been enjoying it on its own merits. Rather, like le Grand Meaulnes in search of his lost domain, I’ve been watching it in the hope of recapturing some of its predecessor’s nostalgia-inducing magic.

What made the original so good? It really ought to have been a flop because its premise was so fundamentally flawed: that the most hateful man in the world, someone we the viewer should yearn to see being........

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