‘We’ve lost the rear oscillator,” says the snow leopard to Lord Asriel. James McAvoy’s face tightens, because his fascinatingly realised steampunkish flying machine is on a collision course with what air crash investigators call, in their quaint way, the ground. How does he propose to complete the recruitment drive for his war against the Authority if his corpse ends up pulled from the wreckage? Let’s not even go there. “Brace!” he yells to his daemon as he activates an appealingly old-school parachute.

Welcome to the final series of His Dark Materials (BBC One), one that will cover the action of The Amber Spyglass, the last volume of Philip Pullman’s trilogy. How poignant that the BBC has chosen the festive season to broadcast Jack Thorne’s virtuosic adaptation of Pullman’s no-less virtuosic inversion of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Not that I’m complaining, but its appearance in the yuletide schedules does clinch the point that Christmas is not the season to celebrate the birth of our redeemer, but for rampant atheism – whether in the form of the worship of mammon or Pullman’s compelling broadside against organised religion.