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The key ingredients barely need repeating. And it’s why, a decade from now, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is going to be a national treasure.

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It’s why Amazon picked up the series and made it so buzzworthy Stateside. It was a stupendous ending, and it launched an already brilliant series into the stratosphere. The series opened with a monologue about anal sex, sped through a terrorist-incited bathroom panic attack and rows and rows of plaster-cast penises – to that finale which threw you totally off-kilter. Read moreīold and filthy and utterly self-assured, Fleabag was unlike anything else on television this year. That’s its umbrella distinction, its overarching achievement: it is a teenage kick, a transport of wonderment that adult life mostly only reminds you of. Planet Earth II made me reach into an emotional vault I haven’t accessed for decades. The dynamics of such scenarios, triumph and disaster, the symphony of co-operation, the elation of escape, underdogs battling desperate odds – these are the cornerstones of narrative, the stuff that drove us to invent language in the first place. The iguana hatchlings chased by snakes were the jewel in its crown, closely followed by the famished lions making an Ocean’s Eleven, last-ditch punt at a giraffe. But I find myself transfixed by its first principle: that we all have a visceral connection to nature, root for it, mourn with it, rejoice with it. The editing is seamless, the scripts are arresting, the perfectionism is there in every particular.

And there is more going on than the majesty of nature. Planet Earth II is a stunning ensemble of talent, beyond David Attenborough’s sober poetry, which he deploys judiciously, modestly and obliquely to remind the audience not just that macaques are cheeky, but that the cameramen are shit hot as well.

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