There is definitely a gap in the television market for short, dark plays with creepy and fantastical twists. The question is whether there is a market in the gap. Would anyone today watch something like Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected? Or do they get all the weirdness they want from Doctor Who?

This week Sky Arts unveiled a short series of tales by a massively popular fantasy writer of our own day and called it Neil Gaiman’s Likely Stories (26 May). Two of the plays, scripted by Kevin Lehane, were broadcast back-to-back this week; two more follow next week. The voice and image of Gaiman himself hovered over proceedings in the shape of snatches of radio and television interviews heard in the background.

“Foreign Parts”, the first of this week’s pair, started with a young man sleepless in bed, while the giant disembodied mouth of a narrator told us, gloatingly, of his problems. He did not like sex, had not had sex for years, and did not miss it. Despite this, however, he appeared to have contracted a venereal disease.