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Lewis' execution is immaculate, and he manages to make these familiar sounds into something that sounds refreshing and even dazzling.

Taken whole, Forget feels undeniably of the moment, fitting in nicely with the craftsmanship of 80s pop revivalists like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Lewis' labelmate Class Actress, and, to some degree, the xx.

Instead of merely evoking an established style, Lewis' songs feel honest and straightforward, so the new wave glances are a vehicle for the songwriting rather than the whole point.

When We’re Dancing is the most stylised, almost camp, piece of electro-chamber-pop, harking back to The Associates or Ultravox.

the album’s most exuberant, danceable moment, I Can’t Wait – borne on a melodic bassline that would have The Cure or The Police wondering if they mislaid it, ripples of Moroder-style synths, and a soaring vocal that shows Lewis isn’t afraid to sing like he’s been trained.

Castles in the Snow verges on comedy goth, with its deliberately cheap-sounding organ. But its processed, desolate moans and the cute-but-twisted sentiments – "you’re my favourite nightmare" – somehow add up to it being one of the best things here

weirdly quacking keys and chinking guitars beneath the prominent synth-string vamps on (say) Shooting Holes at the Moon that make it seem so 80s, or the fluting ‘naïve melody’ of Slow that recalls Talking Heads

a magnificently accomplished debut.

The greatest performance is from Colin Jeavons as the horribly put-upon Donald, brutally called "Donald Duck"

Helen Mirren plays Angela

I don't think I have ever seen in any television drama something as shockingly, explicitly real as Donald's distress after being bullied.

He is all alone, hiding in a barn, rocking back and forth, desperately lonely and sobbing to himself "Come back dad... come back dad... ". It is deeply upsetting to watch because we know that in some angry, masochistic way he is saying this to upset himself still further. This scene - one of the most purely violent I've ever seen in any television programme - shows how important it was to cast adults. Seeing an adult cry like a child is shocking, and adult actors can make children's pain brutally and tactlessly real to an audience which wants to forget what being a child was actually like.

famous lines from AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad, which Potter himself reads over the final sequence:Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.

Could it be that in remembering this past you are not debarred from the blue remembered hills, but rather, you are inhabiting them for the very first time - inhabiting them in a fuller, realer way than when you were there as a child? Memory, though conflicted and anguished, affords you a vivid new presence (and it may also be that Potter wants us to superimpose an ironic meaning on "land of lost content" with its "air that kills"). Now you are there, really there, intensely aware as you never were at the time of the ironies, the injustices and the exquisite luxuries of having nothing to do all day.When an adult truly remembers what it was like to be a child, with an adult's perspective, there is something forbidden and almost transgressive about it. That is what, I think, Potter is getting at when he cast adults as children. It wasn't a stunt: it was a representation of the act of memory.