In 2006, producer Andrew Eaton asked screenwriter Tony Grisoni if he wanted to adapt David Peace’s quartet of novels, starting with 1974. Grisoni was drawn and repelled: “It was strong meat, full of anger and injustice,” he recalls, anchored in the Peter Sutcliffe and Stefan Kiszko cases but “heightened and stylised” - what Peace called “fiction torn from the facts.”

Grisoni was “scared stiff” because the novels were experimental, but he desperately wanted to do it, even if adapting all four meant saying goodbye to several years of his life. The books span a decade with a huge cast, so he condensed a lot. Each film had a different director and format, with its own reference points - for 1974, he thought about Chinatown a lot. The design and costumes were smoky and brown, like the 70s.

The cast went for it big time. David Morrissey did his research, Sean Harris is “nothing if not method,” and they brought in Maxine Peake and Rebecca Hall to counterbalance the masculine story. Grisoni kept the most horrendous violence off-screen: “Violence you imagine is much worse than anything you’ll see.” The police interrogation torture scenes are deliberately terrifying, reflecting the real case of Stefan Kiszko, wrongly imprisoned for 16 years, released in 1992, and dead 18 months later - a man with the mind of a 12-year-old who just wanted his mum.

Grisoni was warned Sutcliffe was litigious, so he used what Sutcliffe actually said in his police interview - “I couldn’t have made it up anyway.” Red Riding was compared to James Ellroy and called “Yorkshire noir,” which is spot-on, though Peace preferred “Yorkshire dark.” Grisoni added redemption at the end because he needed to save somebody and finish on a note of love.

They made 1974, 1980, and 1983 but, for budgetary reasons, not 1977 - which broke his heart. It was always meant to be a quartet, so missing one felt like vandalism. He still hopes they’ll do the missing fourth. The films got a US theatrical release, screened back-to-back, which is full-on, but a cult audience went for it. Critic David Thomson called it “better than The Godfather,” and Nic Pizzolatto said it influenced True Detective. People still discover it and say, “But you seem like quite a nice guy!”

Actor Peter Mullan, who played John Piggott, was warned by his agent there was no money in it. He got halfway through the first script, phoned back to ask who was attached, and when he heard Sean Bean, David Morrissey, Paddy Considine, and Maxine Peake, he said, “Put my name on the list please.” Everyone was on Equity minimum, no trailers, not even a green room - a tremendous experience with a cast of that calibre throwing their all into something that wouldn’t buy them more than a pair of shoes.

Mullan built his character, washed-up solicitor John Piggott, from the dense detail of Peace’s books. In one scene, Piggott flashes back to finding his father’s body; they strapped a camera rig on Mullan so viewers see it through Piggott’s eyes. Piggott is a dope-smoking, heavy-drinking loser who sleeps in his suit and eats a raw Findus Crispy Pancake, but he becomes the unlikely hero, taking on the crooked West Yorkshire police and partly succeeding. He saves the girl at the end, carrying her out of a mineshaft like a Bruce Willis action hero.

Shooting in the underground paedophile’s lair was grim - a dentist’s chair, mattresses on the floor, a child’s shoe. “You needed a shower at the end of the day.” Mullan grew up in York in the 1970s and vividly remembers the Ripper era, cycling home in the pitch black, feeling the palpable tension and Sutcliffe’s elusiveness. The show isn’t exactly a tourist advert for Yorkshire - set dressing included burnt-out cars and upturned shopping trolleys, to which locals would say, “Can’t you put a nice floral arrangement there instead?”

Red Riding is an extraordinary achievement, hard to fault. It rippled into Mullan’s career: Ridley Scott, just starting Robin Hood with Russell Crowe, was given a Red Riding DVD by his casting director, watched it over a weekend, acquired the US rights, and cast Mullan as Friar Tuck. “He must’ve seen me eat the frozen Crispy Pancake and thought: ‘That’s my man!’”