Samantha Morton’s Annie – mum – radiates humanity and warmth. Jessica Hynes frumps up surprising well as Mrs Crabby the schoolmistress (the classroom scenes are hilarious). Ruby Ashbourne Serkis’s Rosie grows ever more beguiling throughout to the viewer, as she does to Laurie.

The even younger Georgie Smith is adorable as the even younger Lee child actors seem to get better and better. Young Archie Cox is the teenage Lee, encapsulating awkwardness and embarrassment, mischief and discovery. “So dry, and shy, it was like two leaves colliding in air,” an older Laurie Lee remembers (perhaps a bit too old Hovis-ad rural-nostalgic from Timothy Spall, narrating – ’twas a grand ride back though!). The kiss, the pastoral one Loll and Rosie have been heading towards throughout, even if he doesn’t know it, is lovely. I don’t believe many people watching won’t have been taken back to their own childhoods, adolescences and early loves, wherever and whenever they were.

And a time in a person’s life when so much is going on and changing, in their heads, and in their pants. Crucially, though, it captures the poetry and the spirit of Lee, and a kind of village life that even towards the ends of the first world war was dying and now no longer exists, except maybe in Outer Mongolia. It doesn’t entirely follow Laurie Lee’s thematic approach, though it does yo-yo backwards and forwards in time. The uncles are lost (the grannies – Trill and Wallon – survive, happily … well, until they sadly die). Which Ben Vanstone, the tailor/mathematician/adapter, has done expertly. A certain amount of trimming and alteration is required. And what works in one doesn’t always work in the other. It’s about mathematics, though, and different media: a 300 page book doesn’t always fit neatly into 90 mins of TV. There’ll be moans and grouches of course, as there have been with the previous ones – they changed this and left out that, the murder, the uncles. They’ve been fabulous though, and Cider With Rosie (BBC1, Sunday), the last, is no exception. A nother Sunday, another adaptation of a classic of 20th century literature.

Cider and rosie