Maybe the TV schedulers felt that any of the other movies of Connery’s era were too old, too out of date. And Moonraker was the modern one, the flashy one, the one that looked pretty. The problem was, however, that pretty soon, we all knew how it was going to turn out. You just had to decide pretty quickly as to whether it was a problem that you knew the ending before you’d even got through the beginning.

And so it is with Sky Atlantic’s glossy new four-part drama. Fleming is compelling enough, but we know that no matter how many thrilling gun battles, ski chases, or kinky S&M sessions he scrapes through on, the titular character is going to get by with nary a bruise on his beautifully chiselled features. In fact, that’s not so much the problem. The real issue is that Fleming himself never thinks he’s in trouble.

Money, success and women come easily to him with a minimum of effort. Now, that may well have been the case (this is a 1940s/50s in which Fleming’s London is populated only with the great, good and gorgeous), but as narrative arcs go, it means that we don’t get to invest a great deal in how things will turn out. We even know that Lara Pulver’s femme fatale Irene Adler Ann O’Neill will end up with our man, since we saw it in the prologue of last week’s opening episode.

We could spend some time telling you what makes Episode 2 different from Episode 1, but the truth is: not all that much. Yes, there is a major event towards the end of this episode that in any other drama would change the characters’ relationships with each other irrevocably, but in a ‘based on real events’ drama that clearly is very (very) loosely based on real events, it becomes challenging to know what facts – or fiction – we are meant to genuinely care about.

There are plenty of nice touches for Bond fans, such as prototypes for M and Moneypenny (the latter being a glorious Anna Chancellor, riffing on Lois Maxwell’s classic interpretation – she clearly quite fancies Fleming, but equally clearly doesn’t care enough to do anything about it).

There are also moments that replicate iconic scenes from the golden pen of Ian Fleming himself – although we shouldn’t expect any steel-brimmed bowler hats anytime soon. All this slick gorgeousness with an exciting plot to hang it on hints at something of a missed opportunity, particularly when the end credits point out something that everyone’s been a bit coy about: this is a BBC co-production.

What would be genuinely quite enticing is a retelling of the early Bond stories, but not in the bang and bombast arena of the movies. A kind of Sherlock-reverse: the stories told in their original 1950s surroundings. You Only Live Twice with Shatterhand’s original torture garden. A Moonraker that never gets above Earth’s atmosphere.

In short, however, knowing how things are going to turn out isn’t always a bad thing. Those viewers who are still unconvinced by the brutal Bourne era of Daniel Craig’s Bond and remember fondly the Cold War era of gritty espionage like From Russia With Love will have a lot of fun here.

Aired at 9pm on Wednesday 19 February 2014 on Sky Atlantic.