We’ve been lucky this year. There has been some very good dramas, and Channel 4 has played a huge part in providing us with a number of meaty morsels. What I like about Channel 4 is that it approaches period drama in the way I like period drama to be approached – grimy, gritty, far-from-perfect and entirely sad and wracked with bad teeth and all sorts of what you imagine life to be like in those times before toothpaste and Listerine. The Devil’s Whore was a very fine case in point. A four-part series, it chronicled the life and times of Angelica Fanshawe, a young woman caught up in the horrific Civil War of the 17th century.

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From the very start, even before transmission, you just knew that this was going to be good. Why? Because it starred John Simm and that is the ultimate seal of quality for any British drama – he just doesn’t appear in any old nonsense don’t-you-know.

This struck a chord with me personally too. My home village is a short drive from Edgehill, one of the Civil War’s many battle fields. In fact my dad was born in the shadows of that beautiful, ghost-infested hill, and from an early age I’ve been fascinated by the whole subject of the Civil War. It’s an event (if you want to call it an event) that has been criminally under-explored by television drama, so thank goodness for Peter Flannery and Martine Brant. Flannery had already written a landmark drama series – Our Friends In The North – and we can count The Devil’s Whore as another of his great achievements.

So it was dripping in pedigree, that much was clear, and thankfully it delivered on so many levels.

The whole series was imbued with a sense of revolution – from Honest John Lilburn’s pamphlets and oratory and Thomas Rainsborough’s dashing idealism to Edward Sexby’s transformation from cold-hearted mercenary to an anti-hero you really rooted for – but for all the backdrop of seismic shifts, bloody battles, Oliver Cromwell and the fall of the monarchy (albeit briefly), at its heart The Devil’s Whore was the story of an extraordinary woman.

Angelica Fanshawe endured so much – the abondment by her mother as a child, the death of her childhood sweetheart, the visions of the devil, the realisation that her life as a Royalist stood for nothing, the death of her second husband, Thomas Rainsborough, the death of her baby, the relentless persecution by Joliffe, two hangings and the death of her third husband, Edward Sexby – but still had enough love in her heart to believe hope and joy were still possible.

As period dramas went, The Devil’s Whore supplied bucket-loads of the required melodrama, but this had so much more. And, in Andrea Riseborough (who we saw in Being Human and The Long Walk To Finchley), a star was born. Her beautiful, wan, porcelain features belied a fearlessness and toughness, and she is now surely one of this country’s greatest actresses.

But it wasn’t just Andrea that was terrific – John Simm was ace, as usual; Tim McInnerny was deliciously malevolent; Maxine Peake was ace, as usual; Dominic West was butch and masculine as Oliver Cromwell; and Peter Capaldi’s portrayal of the King was as good as anything we have seen this year.

Feel free to now insert your own superlatives, but I tell you now – The Devil’s Whore will not be forgotten for a very long time.