Ursula’s birth sparks an intriguing journey as she dies and is reborn time and time again.

Does anybody still talk about something being like a ‘curate’s egg’? It’s not an expression I’ve heard for a very long time – perhaps I came across it in another, mid twentieth century life – but for readers not of my vintage, it means ‘good in parts’. This pretty much sums up my feelings about the first two episodes of the BBC adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s novel Life After Life.

I need to declare, up front, that I haven’t read the book, but I have many good and critically astute friends who have, and they hold it in particular affection. Coming to the series without that pleasure, I can feel this dramatic, visual iteration straining to free itself from the words on the page. Lesley Manville’s narration doesn’t help, constantly reminding us that this is rooted in something slightly stilted and literary. Narrations at their best should be unreliable in some way, but I feel this one to be entirely trustworthy, and largely unnecessary. Perhaps it will justify itself in the concluding episodes.

Where the series also struggles is in realising its central dramatic idea – of a life that is repeatedly terminated by various accidents and disasters, and then re-run to avoid those mortal pitfalls. I imagine that it works perfectly well as written narrative, but contained within a 60-minute TV episode I found myself giggling inappropriately, as it resembled more and more a sort of heritage Health and Safety nightmare. Like watching a Baby Herman cartoon, only in period frocks.

Noo! Don’t lean out of the window!! Noooo!!! Don’t get in the car!!!!

This is unfortunate, because some of the misfortunes that unfold are of a truly serious and sensitive nature, so the falling-anvil quality of some of the Wile E Coyote moments doesn’t sit well in that context.

My other massive stumbling block is the heritage design. The lovely period house that doesn’t look as if anyone actually lives in it; the kitchen with the immaculately painted ceilings and covings that has clearly never seen an open fire or a boiling greasy pot; the father who goes to war in 1914 only to return nearly half a decade later without an additional line on his face and in a uniform that looks as if it has barely spent five minutes in a wardrobe store let alone four years in a trench.

For a series that is, in many ways, about the consequences of life, too many every day physical consequences are annoyingly absent. I was also mystified by small inconsistencies, such as Ursula’s birth, opening the series in a snowy midwinter, but being celebrated in episode 2 in the height of summer. Not to mention the laugh out loud moment when one of the actresses playing child Ursula, who appears to be well into her late teens, declares that she is just ten years old. Yes, I accept that these may be trivial nit-pickings, but taken together they only serve to alienate the viewer from a series that is trying to talk about profound and highly sensitive topics.

On the plus side, Thomasin McKenzie (late of Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho) is magnetic and Sian Clifford equally so, if under-used.

Verdict: Life After Life is one of those shows you are willing to be a lot better than it is. I’ll certainly follow it to its conclusion, but it has a good deal of ground to make up to really prove itself. 6/10

Martin Jameson