And it is “bleak and unflinching in its view of masculinity,” the BBC tells me. The programme is about two step-brothers, who between them personify two masculine archetypes: one weak and repressed and impressionable; the other bullish and violent and unequivocal. It makes for a striking and, at times, frightening story about fraternal trauma.

But I never found that its commentary about masculinity overcame the particularities of its plotting.We open partway through a wedding in Scotland – there’s some sort of cheerful ceilidh going on. But we quickly cut from the celebrations to some dismal outhouse where two men face each other, one small and suited (it’s his wedding day), the other stripped to the waist, fearsome and heavily tattooed (none of the tattoos actually say “toxic”, but you get the picture). “I’m not speaking about this,” says the smaller, the opening line of the series, and very much its theme, because communication and its failures will be cropping up later.

The exchange continues for a little while, before ending abruptly when the larger man strikes the smaller, and he falls bloodied to the floor.We flashback from here to some point in the 1980s, where our characters also get some names. The smaller man was once an even smaller teenager, Niall. He is bullied at school – Niall’s first scene shows another lad seize his Indiana Jones trading cards and shove them down his crotch – and his mother is living with another woman, in circumstances that have not been clarified to Niall but which his schoolmates have deduced.

And Niall has another problem on his plate: his mother’s cohabitant has a son, Ruben, who has just been released from borstal and will also be coming to live with them, sharing Niall’s room. Ruben’s reputation apparently precedes him, because Niall is terrified.You can see why: when Ruben turns up, he’s revealed to be one of those men who hit puberty about eight, and though he’s only a year or two older than Niall, he looks about 30. He becomes a combination of Niall’s minder and his tormenter.

He sorts out the school bullies on his first day, but then sets out to – how else to put it – heterosexually induct Niall, sharing the girlfriend he brings over with him (she, slightly incredibly, is bang up for this).It’s not the only part of the programme that rings rather false. The second episode opens a few years later, with Niall heading to university, and his mother hoping he’ll make a break with the dependency he has now developed on Ruben. And while students are capable of all manner of ponciness, no one actually doesn’t “believe” in handshakes because they’re “a social construct designed to keep us apart”.

And I’ll admit that I slightly struggled to believe in the reality of Celeste, the French exchange student who seems intent on thieving skinny, unremarkable boys of their virginity.If these characters feel quite broadly drawn, so is the programme’s symbolism. When urging Niall to man up, Ruben hands him a pair of boxing gloves; when we later jump back to Niall’s wedding, his mother presents him with a knife that had once belonged to his father; when Ruben reappears later on, he comes dressed in black, on a black motorbike, with a black box on the back. And while the themes that emerge are sympathetic and involving – we sense, and then realise, that Niall is actually gay – they are dramatised in such an aggressive and heavy-handed way that they lose all subtlety. For a programme that wants to range well beyond “adolescence”, taking in the full maturity of man, it seemed willing to confront masculinity only in its most extreme manifestations. [Further reading: Queen Elizabeth II’s unhappy birthday]