A new series or one-off drama by Stephen Poliakoff is always an event, but to get the most from them you have to make certain allowances.

For a start, they usually seem to take place in a parallel universe, similar to our own but with elegant people in beautiful clothes, speaking in impossibly graceful sentences as they navigate their way around luxury hotels, preparing to be brought down by dirty secrets from the past. What’s more, Poliakoff’s dramas usually move with the measured pace and elegance of a vintage Rolls-Royce.
So there was a familiar feel to the first episode (of seven) of Close to the Enemy (10 November). What was different, though, was the precise location in time and place of the drama. We were in England in 1946. German citizens were being dragged into England, some of them, we quickly learned, because of their importance to our post-war war machine.

Among the reluctant immigrants were Dieter Koehler, a “jet-plane man”, and his young daughter. A military intelligence officer, Callum Ferguson (Jim Sturgess), was given the task of persuading him to bring his engineering expertise to help little Britain in its technological arms race against the real superpowers.