In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After all, he made his name with the film This Is England and its three rightly acclaimed TV sequels, about a group of working-class folks struggling to survive against the heartless backdrop of that reliable old enemy: Thatcher’s Britain. Now, he’s giving us a costume drama set in 18th-century Yorkshire.

In fact, though, it didn’t take long to realise that Meadows’s departure mightn’t be as radical as advertised – because the programme could easily have been entitled This Was England. Wednesday’s opening episode even began with a series of captions making it clear that, for the Calder Valley, the 1760s were a kind of proto-1980s, as traditional industries were wiped out and workers cast aside.

Meanwhile, a man was dragging himself across a landscape of the purest grey – pausing only to examine the stab wound in his stomach, to collapse occasionally and to have visions of several cloaked figures with stags’ skulls for faces. As something more like social realism set in, he reached his home village where we learned that his name was David Hartley and that, rather impressively, he and his wound had walked from Birmingham where he’d spent the past seven years. Before long he’d been efficiently healed by the local herbalist and brought up to speed on the death of both his father and the village’s cottage weaving industry.

And that, as far as the first episode went, was pretty much that. Anybody who knows who the real-life David Hartley was, or has access to Google, will be aware that he’s about to lead one of Britain’s biggest ever criminal enterprises. But for now Meadows concentrated on setting the scene, building the atmosphere and making sure we knew where our sympathies lay.

Fortunately, he did a fine job of all three, since, along with his familiar themes, his familiar qualities were present in the new setting too. While his political concerns are never terribly mistakeable, they’re always firmly embodied in characters who, like actual human beings, have plenty of more personal things to worry about. There’s also the wonderfully naturalistic acting he gets from the whole cast.

Admittedly, one side effect here of his usual semi-improvised approach is that some of the dialogue is suspiciously modern – with David described as ‘not in a good place’ and people telling him: ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ Yet, this verbal intertwining of past and present might well be part of Meadows’s central point: that these people aren’t so different from us – or, at any rate, from their descendants in his previous work. It also means that, as those stag-skulled dudes suggested, the social realism is accompanied by something more intriguingly odd, even dreamlike, that prevents the show from becoming straight (i.e. dull) agitprop.

Certainly, The Gallows Pole is a masterclass in subtlety compared with the other big new historical drama of the week. White House Plumbers (Tuesday) tells the story of the Watergate break-in from the perspective of two of the key perpetrators – and, so far at least, is keeping it very broad indeed.

Woody Harrelson plays E. Howard Hunt, whom we first saw in 1971 as a washed-up CIA operative still blaming Kennedy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs. But then came a call from the White House. The activist Daniel Ellsberg had just leaked the Pentagon Papers, about what the US was really up to in Vietnam, and President Nixon had decided that he needed a ‘real son of a bitch’ to discredit him (although Hunt himself would have preferred the more old-school methods of tarring, feathering and hanging). His chief colleague in the campaign would be G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) who struck even Hunt as a little right-wing – what with his habit of playing his dinner-party guests speeches by Adolf Hitler at full volume.

Nonetheless, the pair formed a dumb and dumber-style partnership, donning fright wigs and heading to California to steal Ellsberg’s file from his psychiatrist: a plan stymied only by the fact that their walkie-talkies were almost as useless as the comedy Cubans they’d engaged to carry out the theft. Strangely, the upshot was that the White House has now given them $1 million to do whatever it takes to get Nixon re-elected.

The trouble with all this is not only that there’s a constant sense of over-striving for effect, but also that it’s never quite clear precisely what effect the programme is over-striving for. Are we meant to be amused by the pair’s incompetence or horrified by their politics? In another show, of course, the answer could well be ‘both’. In this one, the two elements undermine each other so thoroughly that we end up feeling not enough of either.