The algorithm of spy thrillers - let's call it the Bond paradigm - depends on striking a very delicate balance between the modern world and an echo of a bygone era. A sort of old meets new peppered with martinis and mysterious women with names like Miss Honeyhives or Miss Tittyknickers. It's an awful cliche, but a successful one.

A little too much modern and you have a present-day terrorist thriller. No one likes those. They're depressing. A little too much bygone era and you risk turning it into Carry on Spying. And while we don't mind those - whoops, vicar! - we're as likely to laugh at them as we are to take their more pensive moments seriously.

Based on a John Le Carre novel, The Night Manager could have easily gone the way of the former, a modern, pumped-up action thriller which hit all those predictable notes. And the television adaptation actually nudges the story a little forward - to the Arab Spring, which had not yet happened when the book was originally written.

But in the process it loses none of its bygone brilliance. Achieving that is tough, kudos to director Susanne Bier, writer David Farr and cinematographer Michael Snyman, who effortlessly build a very modern world flooded with tiny, timeless touches. The final effect is dazzling.

Hiddleston plays Jonathan Pine, a British soldier who works for an intelligence agency headed by Angela Burr (Olivia Colman). Hugh Laurie is Richard Roper, the arms dealer. You know the type. Seems terribly charming, in a British way, and then you discover he's a rotter. Elizabeth Debicki is his girlfriend Jed. Tom Hollander is somewhere in there playing one of Roper's associates.

The series plays hard and fast with the finer details of the book. For example, Burr in the novel is written as a man, but casting Colman is genius. She was brilliant in the very tense Broadchurch. And, while we're doling out compliments, she was also brilliant in Jonathan Harvey's raucous but tender Beautiful People. Short summary: Olivia Colman is insanely good. How she's not in everything is a mystery.

It also shifts the setting for the series' denouement from the Bahamas (such an old-school spy locale) to the more modern Mediterranean. But that doesn't really matter, except that it exchanges the tropics for something a little more familiar.

This is a ripper of a story, amplified by its amazing cast. Hiddleston is primarily a film actor but lands here because of that peculiar wrinkle which sees many British TV actors end up in American cinema.

And as a TV series to lose yourself in, this is scrumptious. It seems too long since something like this has come along - remember when Broadchurch was new? Or The Bridge? You should get on to The Night Manager now. We'll be talking about this for a long time to come.