AS he describes the unfolding narrative of his TV series Crime, two states of mind are going on in writer Irvine Welsh’s feel for it: both a serene strategy, and a wrecker’s glee. He has taken the most popular TV genre, the “pacey, entertaining cop drama” and turned it inside out.

“The biggest point for me” says Welsh, “is that Lennox (the hero) is NOT a cop. I’m not really interested in someone who is a servant of the state in that way.”

The plan has always been to use the crime genre as a “Trojan horse” to capture the audience, and then to turn it into something else: “an existential thriller,” the story of a man “trying to solve the mystery of himself.”