Edge of Darkness a 1985 miniseries more intriguing than the football

We're now long past the stage of 11pm kick-offs, but BBC4's decision to repeat the brooding, quietly bonkers 1985 miniseries Edge of Darkness late on Monday nights is the best kind of World Cup counter-programming, even if Gaia – the name of Joanne Whalley's gung-ho eco-militant pressure group – sounds like someone who might play on the left wing for Brazil. Devised by Z-Cars co-creator Troy Kennedy Martin and broad enough in its artistic ambition to encompass the creeping military-industrial cosiness between Reagan and Thatcher, the threat of state-sponsored nuclear terrorism, the then-radical environmental theories of James Lovelock and an evocative (if endlessly repeated) Eric Clapton guitar solo, Edge of Darkness is hardly an overlooked gem lost to the shifting tides of TV history. When the six-part series first screened on BBC2, its notoriety grew so rapidly it was immediately repeated in double-bill chunks on BBC1, and repeated a third time not long after. Nominated for 11 Baftas in 1986, it won six of them.

It didn't just burn bright and fade away, either. In 2010, when this paper compiled a definitive list of the 50 greatest TV dramas, the omission of Edge of Darkness caused such a vituperative reader backlash that the series was promptly reassessed. A ferociously beloved 1980s artefact, then, with a critical half-life as potent as the plutonium at the murky heart of its mystery. But if you haven't yet seen Edge of Darkness, this is the perfect chance to wade into its treacherous psychological and philosophical depths, and drink in the performance of the late Bob Peck.

Probably still best known as raptor-rustling game warden Robert "Clever Girl" Muldoon in Jurassic Park, Peck is absolutely mesmerising as Craven, a brusque, plainspoken CID detective whose world is upended when his daughter Emma (Whalley) is killed in a violent shotgun ambush. Investigating her death takes Craven from Yorkshire to London and beyond as he doggedly tugs at the threads of a malevolent international conspiracy that also dredges up his own ambiguous past. It's an intense and unsettling portrait of a man so grief-stricken that he hallucinates talking to his daughter's ghost yet so implacably driven that he unnerves both his superiors and his shadowy enemies.

Even if you've seen Edge of Darkness before, the repeats are an opportunity to zero in on the endless weird details in Martin's dense tale to cautiously weigh them up for significance, like True Detective but with more cups of tea. Why is Joe Don Baker's exuberant, golf-loving CIA man Jedburgh so eager to help Craven, and so obsessed with Come Dancing? What do the debates about the Willie Nelson song Time of The Preacher really represent? Why didn't Tim McInnerny play shiftily cocksure bastards more often? And is there a deeper meaning to the casting of weatherman Bill Giles?

It's also a timely reminder of the series' ongoing influence almost three decades on. There was definitely some Edge of Darkness DNA in Hugo Blick's atmospheric and oblique 2011 series The Shadow Line and every David Peace novel featuring a Yorkshireman repressing an existential howl while grimly going about his duty reminds me of Craven and his cold, heartbroken fury.

If you can't hold out for the weekly instalments on BBC4, you should seek out the DVD box set, as the series hasn't made it to Netflix. More readily available on streaming services is the 2010 movie starring Mel Gibson, a relocated and dishearteningly awful remake overseen by original series director Martin Campbell. If anything, the film adaptation retroactively tarnishes the reputation of the source material, although it does offer the increasingly rare opportunity of seeing Ray Winstone on-screen without him banging on about the wonders of in-play betting.

Edge of Darkness, 10pm, BBC4

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