Last night saw the start of the BBC’s explosive new eight-part thriller series based on the shocking world of real-life global criminality.

McMafia has already been described as the must-see drama of 2018.

Starring James Norton, this edgy tale of English toffs and Russian gangsters tells the story of Alex Godman, the privately educated son of a Russian oligarch in exile who appears to have rejected his family’s past and chosen to become part of the English establishment.

As the story begins he is a high-flying hedge fund manager engaged to his equally accomplished banker girlfriend, played by Juliet Rylance.

However, a personal tragedy soon finds Godman involved in a dangerous game of cat and mouse involving gangsters from his Russian homeland and shadowy figures from the world of organised crime, including Mexican drug cartels, Pakistani drug lords and Balkan smugglers.

Director James Watkins, who co-created the thriller with Iranian screenwriter Hossein Amini, says they were interested in examining a world in which “the corporate has become criminal and the criminal corporate”.

The big budget series was inspired by journalist Misha Glenny’s non-fiction book, McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime. Published 10 years ago, it documented various real-life mafia organisations thriving around the world but remains just as relevant today.

Although Godman’s experience of being swept into the world of organised crime while trying to protect his family is fictional, the real world workings of modern criminality against which the action takes place comes from Glenny’s critically acclaimed investigation, which explored the modern spread of transnational crime following the break-up of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

When communism fell, drugs, prostitution, money laundering and extortion soon followed on an industrial scale as Kazakhs, Georgians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs and Russians all sought turf in the new gangster-land of Eastern Europe.

Post-Soviet protection rackets quickly sprang up and before long, the effects of the Russian organised crime boom had rippled out worldwide, from Europe to the Middle East, to Asia and to Africa.

It is on this intercontinental canvas that the action plays out.

This enabled James Norton, 32, to explore the full sweep of filming locations – which included Moscow, Tel Aviv, Qatar, Prague and Mumbai – while throwing his hat into the ring as a potential new James Bond.

For if 2016’s The Night Manager was Tom Hiddleston’s Bond audition piece, McMafia is quite clearly Cambridge-educated Norton’s turn to swan around in a dinner jacket while giving his impeccable vowels and devilishly symmetrical features an outing.

Best known for his roles in the British TV series Happy Valley, Grantchester and War & Peace, Norton was nominated for the Bafta for Best Supporting Actor for his role as ex-convict Tommy Lee Royce in crime drama Happy Valley in 2015 but lost out to Stephen Rea.

The casting of Norton was key.

“James has played matinee idols and princes but he has also played Tommy Lee Royce and we really saw the chance to collide those two types of character into one role,” says James Watkins.

“The thing with Alex is that there are two sides to him. He has been through the public school system and has this polished exterior but underneath it all he is still his father’s son.”

In real life Norton is the son of Hugh, a former lecturer at Hull School of Art and Design, and Lavinia, a teacher.

Born in London, Norton grew up with his parents in North Yorkshire and has described his privileged childhood as “idyllic”.

Educated at Ampleforth College, where he excelled in theatre and tennis, he read theology at Fitzwilliam College Cambridge and graduated in 2007 with first class honours.

He started his film career while still at Rada and has also appeared in theatre in London’s West End.

Juliet Rylance, 38, plays Alex’s girlfriend Rebecca.

The Radatrained stepdaughter of actor Sir Mark Rylance is best known for the 2013 film Days And Nights, based on the Anton Chekhov play The Seagull.

She starred in and produced the film, written and directed by her husband Christian Camargo whom she had met when he worked with her stepfather during Sir Mark’s tenure as the first artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.

Notably, the cast includes Georgian and Russian actors for authenticity, including Aleksey Serebryakov as Dimitri Godman, Alex’s father, and Mariya Shukshina as Oksana Godman, Alex’s mother.

“It’s actually a state-of-the-nation treatise on globalisation masquerading as a slick thriller – and we’re fine with that,” says Watkins.