If you were a BBC, ITV or Channel 4 drama commissioner, you're probably cursing your luck.
Long before Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Apple TV+ came on the scene, you would had the pick of the crop when commissioning television scripts.
Great writers like Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale, Lynda La Plante, Jimmy McGovern, Sally Wainwright, Paul Abbott and Alan Plater all made their name on terrestrial television and delivered stunning work.
Huge audiences tuned in for adaptations of Robert Graves' 'I Claudius,' Anthony Trollope's 'The Barchester Chronicles' or John Le Carre's 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'.
However the shift in the British television landscape brought about by streaming has changed all that.
Nowhere is that better illustrated than with a show like 'Slow Horses' winding up on Apple TV+.
An adaptation of Mick Herron's 'Slough House' novels, Will Smith's spy series has all the hallmarks of what would once have been a dead cert for a BBC1 Sunday night primetime prestige drama.
It has top notch cast of A List British actors like Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas and Jonathan Pryce.
It is intelligently written, with just the right amount of irreverance.
The show is also really expertly paced, taking time to establish its characters and knowing when to ramp up to its big set pieces.
'Slow Horses' is the nickname given to a group of MI5 misfits who have been written off by the British intelligence service and condemned to spend the rest of their careers in a grotty London office building known as Slough House.
Their crime has been to screw up on the job.
Instead of firing these agents, they are put out to pasture and kept away from the rest of MI5 in case they infect them with their mediocrity.
Series one begins in exhilarating fashion as if we have been plunged right into the high octane theatrics of a Jed Mercurio drama.
Jack Lowden's River Cartwright is following a terror suspect through Stansted Airport.
Director James Hawes crafts eight tense minutes where River communicates with a team back in MI5 HQ, waiting for a order to arrest the suspect who is Asian.
When the order comes, he and some fellow agents pursue the man wrestling him to the ground as he is about to board a plane - only to realise he is clean and they have the wrong person.
Sprinting through the airport to locate the real suspect, River confronts him at the baggage reclaim.
However it is too late. The suspect reaches for his device.
Then in a wonderful sleight of hand we realise that the incident is actually a training exercise.
River's initial pursuit of the wrong suspect results in his career being stymied and in him being sent to work for Gary Oldman's cynical agent Jackson Lamb in Slough House.
When we next see the young agent, he is wading through trash bags as part of a surveillance on a journalist, Paul Hilton's Robert Hobden who is suspected of links to far right politicians.
His colleague, Olivia Cooke's Sidonie "Sid" Baker obtains a copy of Hobden's flash drive by manufacturing a coffee spilling incident in the cafe where he is typing on his laptop.
Cartwright heads to MI5 headquarters at Regents Park to hand over the flash drive but ends up verbally sparring with Freddie Fox's unctuous James "Spider" Webb who he blames for giving him to wrong information during the Stansted operation.
River, however, has made a copy of the drive too and informs Sid that he is looking into the activities of Christopher Villiers' Greg Simmonds who he suspects is funding far right groups.
Lamb ushers both of them out of Slough House, arguing if his staff don't leave work by 5pm then he mustn't be doing his job properly.
Seeking counsel from his retired MI5 grandee grandfather, Jonathan Pryce's David Cartwright, River is told to be wary of HQ's interest in Hobden who has been warning other journalists of an imminent terror attack.
If MI5 is deploying Slough House on operations, he suspects it is for the purposes of plausible deniability for other activities it is engaged in.
However when a far right gang called The Sons of Albion abduct an aspiring Asian stand-up comedian studying at Leeds University, Antonio Aakeel's Hassan Ahmed and threaten to execute him, it sets in train a series of events that will pitch Slough House against MI5 and force all members of the team to go on the run.
Series one of 'Slow Horses' plays out like a gloriously dysfunctional version of a John Le Carre espionage tale, with Oldman's Jackson Lamb turning out to be a bitter and much more twisted counterpoint to George Smiley who he portrayed so brilliantly in the 2011 movie version of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'.
Watching Oldman with his couldn't give a damn attitude and his slovenly appearance, you cannot help feeling what a missed opportunity it was not to allow him and his director Thomas Alfredson to make 'Smiley's People' either for film or television.
Although Oldman is too smart not to rehash the George Smiley act and creates a radically different character.
The central joke in 'Slow Horses' is that Lamb, Cartwright and their fellow screw-ups are much better agents than those working in HQ and are often several steps ahead of them.
And while Oldman provides many of the laughs in Smith's show (particularly his disdain for his Slough House colleagues), Lowden is perfectly cast as the earnest and unfairly maligned River.
Cooke, Rosalind Eleazar as Louisa Guy, Dustin Demri-Burns as Min Harper, Christopher Chung as the cocky tech whizz Roddy Ho and Saskia Reeves' as the recovering alcoholic admin officer Catherine Standish are all good value as the various cock-ups on Lamb's books.
Kristin Scott Thomas' haughtiness is perfectly deployed as Diana Taverner, the MI5 Deputy Director General who views Lamb and his agents with contempt and would ruthlessly sell her colleagues down the river.
Fox does a good line in sliminess and misplaced confidence.
Pryce embraces the patrician role.
Steven Waddington pops up as a former member of an MI5 internal affairs unit known as The Dogs which Chris Reilly's Nick Duffy and Chris Coghill's Hobbs are members of.
Paul Hilton is suitably shifty as the dodgy journalist Robert Hobden, Christopher Villiers catches the eye as Greg Simmonds and Samuel West is on top form as Peter Judd, a rising star on the Conservative backbenches in Westminster who has contacts with far right activists.
Antonio Aakeel is tremendously sympathetic as the kidnap victim, while Sam Hazeldine, Brian Vernel and Stephen Walters excel as members of The Sons of Albion who have varying degrees of fanaticism to the far right cause.
As with the best espionage dramas, not everything is as it seems and Smith and his fellow screenwriters Morwenna Banks, Mark Denton and Johnny Stockwood do a great job sending the audience down rabbit holes and suddenly pulling rabbits out of various hats.
They are complemented by James Hawes' direction who makes great use of the show's locations mostly around London with the help of cinematographer Danny Cohen who captures the British capital in all its glory and its seediness.
One minute you savour the pomp and the grandeur of the city's classic seats of power, its slick modernist buildings and then, you see the show's characters scurrying around London's darker, grotty corners.
With the help of film editors, Kate Wieland and Luke Dunkley, Hawes never loses control of the pacing of the show - granting the audience sufficient time to get to properly know the characters and all their foibles.
There's no unnecessary hairing around and thrill seeking.
Any cliffhangers are there for a reason and they are properly thought out, not treating the audience like Pavlov's dogs.
'Slow Horses' is as good a reason as Apple TV could ever craft for people to subscribe to its service.
It's tremendous fun and really benefits from never taking itself too seriously, giving it a irresistible earthy charm.
Who could resist its confidence and self-deprecating charm?
It's no wonder they commissioned a second series so quickly.
(Series one of 'Slow Horses' was made available for streaming on Apple TV from April 1-29, 2022)
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