You can almost smell the Seventies in this riveting cold case drama

Steeltown Murders ★★★★☆ Hapless ★★★★★

Fire up the Quattro! Philip Glenister is back as a time-travelling copper — and this time he’s got a moustache. He isn’t playing DCi Gene Hunt, though, and Steeltown Murders (BBC1) is not the long-promised sequel to Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes. instead, this four-part drama recreates the cold case investigation that caught a 1970s serial killer and rapist.

That means straddling two time zones. Glenister plays inspector Paul Bethell in the 2000s, sharing the role with Scott Arthur as the diligent young DC Bethell in 1973.

The two actors are so similar that it’s easy to recognise them as the same man in different eras, but the constant switching between decades does slow the story down.

That’s a real shame, because it’s a moving and engrossing case, and writer ed Whitmore powerfully evokes both the horror of the crimes and the reluctance of the community to reopen the wounds.

it might have been better, and certainly simpler, to keep the two strands separate — to reconstruct the murders and then to trace the dogged work of police after advances in DNA analysis made it possible to re-examine the evidence.

Part of the problem is the sheer vividness of the Seventies scenes. Backed by heavy pop from Mott the Hoople and Badfinger, those working men’s clubs and rainy bus stops look so real that you can almost smell the rothmans King Size.

Some great CGi backdrops add to the realism, including a shot of the M4 under construction outside Neath. indoors, it’s all leatherette armchairs and rough stonework.

The Noughties are less convincing, despite desktop computers as big as breezeblocks. Those years lacked a defining style — everything was pale beige.

Young and old, Bethell is a methodical copper with a conscience, who believes in straight questions and solid fact-checking. Unlike Gene Hunt, he’s more at home in the later period. When he does go off-book, taking a suspect to a murder scene in the hope of bullying a confession out of him, he looks guilty enough to arrest himself for police brutality.

Gene would love the total absence of political correctness in Hapless (Amazon Prime Video), a snort-with-laughter sitcom about a socially inept newspaper reporter. The show began on Amazon as The Jewish enquirer, before Channel 5 streamed it under its new name. it then went to Netflix and, thanks to the persistence of writer Gary Sinyor, is back for a second series on Amazon.

Starring Tim Downie as Paul Green, a man who never stuffs one foot in his mouth when there’s room for two, Hapless combines shamelessly smutty jokes with a unique appetite for philosophical debate and broad physical gags. You’re never sure whether the next line will be the opening salvo in a sarcastic argument about Middle east politics, or a filthy innuendo. No other comedy would dare wonder out loud why arachnophobia is fear of spiders, not prejudice against spiders . . . so why is homophobia not fear of gay people?

it’s set in North London, and many of the running jokes are about tensions between Muslims and Jews. i simply don’t dare tell you the punchline about why storms don’t have islamic names such as Ahmed, or how to tell the difference between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews . . . but i nearly choked laughing.

Hapless is filmed on such a tight budget that one of the sets is Sinyor’s own house. it exists solely because of his determination to bring it to screen, whatever the risks.

Good comedy takes time to develop the characters and find its rhythm, and courage to make us laugh. That’s why there’s so little of it around now. This one deserves to succeed.