By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that novel and turn it into a TV drama. But while we wait for someone to do it, Great Expectations stays true to the current ideals of junking large parts of the source material and infecting what remains with the neuroses of our own age – thereby demonstrating once again the strange modern neediness to believe in our superiority to all those benighted bigots who came before us. (Please tell us we’re the best people who ever lived! Please!) Or rather, it takes those ideals to new heights that are either infuriating or hilarious depending on your mood.

In fact, last week’s first episode was – certainly by the standards of this week’s second – almost fair enough. OK, so Pip said ‘shit’ more often than in the original novel, and was less like a frightened, semi-literate boy than a poised, well-educated young man. The programme also opened not with that predictable old terrifying scene for the ages featuring Magwitch on the marshes, but with the adult Pip about to commit suicide. For most of the time, though, writer Steven Knight appeared to retain some lingering faith in Dickens’s storytelling abilities – at least once they’ve been stripped of such distractions as comedy and tenderness.

The episode’s ending was pretty promising too, as Miss Havisham (Olivia Colman) looked at Pip and murmured sinisterly:  ‘I want you to play.’ It was a moment that seemed to justify Knight’s decision to crank up her menace, and in a way that intensified rather than betrayed Dickens’s version.

But then came Sunday’s instalment, which sometimes felt like the product of a night in the pub. (‘Tell you what. Why don’t we make Mrs Joe a dominatrix who whips Mr Pumblechook?’) Either that, or the result of a moderately serious nervous breakdown.

So it was that in the early scenes, the sight of Mr P.’s bare buttocks being struck was interspersed with Miss H. swigging laudanum and reciting the titles of 1970s pop songs: ‘Love hurts. Love’s unkind.’ And from there we moved to a parody of 1970s experimental theatre as Estella and Miss Havisham instructed Pip in social advancement by striding about the set spouting agitprop. ‘To become a gentleman,’ Estella pointed out, ‘you have to learn to thrash the people below you’ – later clarifying that ‘a gentleman only has to observe good manners with those who are members of his own class. Those below are for using.’ (‘You want to write that down,’ Miss Havisham told Pip – and possibly us – ‘those below are for using.’)

Meanwhile at Newgate prison, the warders were beating up prisoners, and at the Old Bailey, Jaggers the lawyer was blackmailing a judge over his taste for young male flesh.

Not that Estella and Miss Havisham had finished their tutorials yet. To teach Pip dancing, Miss H. hired a group of musicians to play in her splendid ballroom, ‘built by my father with the profits from opium, indigo and slaves’. On his 18th birthday, they introduced him to the gentlemanly art of sexually abusing lower-class women with the aid of Mrs Gibbons, a somewhat improbable local prostitute, whom they invited Pip to treat as roughly as he liked. (In the face of serious competition, this might have been the most infuriating/hilarious scene of the lot.) Naturally, too, there were several discussions of the commendable ruthlessness of the Empire – a word that appears in the novel precisely zero times.

But I know what you’re thinking: that’s imperialism, class, racism, hypocrisy, judicial corruption and homophobia ticked off the list, but where’s the denunciation of Victorian sexism? Well, never fear, that was there as well – and again Knight was in no mood to leave anything to chance, even if it meant Pip suddenly becoming a master of the polished epigram. At one point, he asked his village friend Biddy for help with the learning he needed to impress his superiors. ‘Everybody knows you’re the cleverest person in school,’ he said. ‘But you’re a girl, so your cleverness is seen like horns on a horse: odd, alarming and of no practical use.’

Of course, Knight (creator of Peaky Blinders) is entitled to write a disjointed and irony-free Victorian political melodrama if he wants. The trouble comes with calling it Great Expectations and claiming, as he has done, that it’s the kind of TV drama Dickens would have written if he’d had the benefit of being around now. To which the gentlest response would be: are you sure?

Certainly, I’d suggest, one thing Dickens wouldn’t have done is produce anything as joyless, dreary and patronising to the audience as this. After all, if he had, it surely wouldn’t have been around 160 years later to be traduced on television.