Despite featuring vampires on the loose it rarely lets much blood flow, and the boffing between these two inhuman superbeings, whose ardour is meant to fuse two immortal, elemental forces, is strictly vanilla. In contrast, A Discovery of Witches is, considering the subject matter, painfully genteel. It would be disrespectful to Outlander fans to say they watch it purely for the cruel violence and desperately hot sex, but they’re certainly not skipping past them. But that comparison shows up what makes A Discovery of Witches drag. Outlander went a bit dour a couple of years back, so we have room in the schedules for a time-travelling love story that shifts to a different place and era when it gets bored with the old one. Instead we’re in musty Tudor chambers, ducking under gnarly beams and swapping exposition with Walter Raleigh and Christopher Marlowe, the latter played by Tom Hughes with an extreme side parting and a chip on his shoulder large enough to start a fire. In the season two opener at least, there’s almost no Trevor Eve as the leader of the bad vampires, eyes beady and hair swept up dead straight, like a furious silver-plated parasaurolophus no Alex Kingston as Diana’s reliable American aunty no sigh-worthy shots of Venice, the HQ of the shadowy “Congregation”, which in this story is fantastical creatures’ version of the masons.

Now – in line with the second book in the bestselling All Souls trilogy by American novelist Deborah Harkness – they’re in London in 1590, and immediately there’s a crisis: Diana and Matthew have isolated themselves from the locations and ensemble cast that were the best things about the show. As we left them, our heroes had changed into loose tunics and were holding hands tightly as they prepared to evade the kerfuffle and decamp to the 16th century using Diana’s recently mastered ability to move through time. Meanwhile, Diana herself accepted that she is not just a witch but a uniquely powerful one, this epiphany coaxed out of her by her lover, a kind geneticist called Matthew who’s also a vampire.

A discovery of witches season 2 leaked