How do you follow a great sitcom? Judging from How to Get to Heaven from Belfast and Small Prophets, the answer is by keeping the same sort of characters, having a plot about a missing woman and adding a touch of the supernatural.

Both shows – Lisa McGee’s successor to Derry Girls and Mackenzie Crook’s to Detectorists, respectively – also reflect a slightly mad (in theory) but wholly justified (in practice) confidence that the goodwill established by a much-loved series means viewers will go wherever you lead them, no matter how strange things become.

France can no longer ignore the menace of left-wing violence

The martyrdom of Chris Kaba

The Great Boomer Declutter is under way

And in McGee’s case, they become very strange indeed. How to Get to Heaven began as if we were in for a dark, rather solemn thriller. ‘I still dream about that night sometimes,’ a voice-over intoned as four frightened sixth-form girls from Belfast watched a burning shack in the woods.

A few seconds – and 20 years – later, three of them were experiencing carefully varied forms of middle-aged regret. Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) was a stressed-out family carer, mourning the life she didn’t have; Robyn (Sinead Keenan),........

© The Spectator