The English: Ciarán Hinds is marvellously villainous. Emily Blunt dons a Mary Poppins dress and an Eli Wallach scowl

Television: The BBC’s new series looks like a western but never particularly feels like one

It’s 30-plus years since Clint Eastwood gave us the last word on the revisionist western with Unforgiven. Thirty years is also generally agreed to have been the lifespan of the actual Old West, from 1865 to 1895. We’ve been deconstructing westerns far longer than the real milieu existed.

Among other highlights, Unforgiven featured a cameo by Richard Harris as “English Bob”, a Brit abroad whose best days as a bounty hunter are long behind him. In Hugo Blick’s The English (BBC Two, Thursday, 9pm), that mantle of Irish actor trying on an accent and a Stetson is taken up by Ciarán Hinds, marvellously villainous as a Wyoming hotelier named Richard Watts.

The English features a bucket list of cliches. There are one-horse towns, creaking signs, and a shoot-out where everyone reaches for their pistol on the count of three

That the words “hotelier” and “villainous” feature in the same sentence says a lot about The English, which takes the Eastwood route of simultaneously celebrating and decrying the folklore of the Old West. The problem is that Blick (who wrote and directed Black Earth Rising, the BBC series from 2018 about the prosecution of war criminals, starring Michaela Coel as a Rwandan-born British legal investigator) is so obsessed with ticking off the tropes that he forgets to include much of a story. Po-faced and ponderous, The English never stops feeling like a tribute to the more entertaining westerns from which it takes inspiration.

Part of that mythology revolves around damsels in distress and bloodthirsty Indians. The spin that The English brings is to make these two archetypes the heroes. Emily Blunt dons a Mary Poppins dress and an Eli Wallach scowl to portray Lady Cornelia Locke. She’s an aristocrat from the old country trailing her child’s killer.

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A run-in with Watts threatens to snuff out her revenge mission before it has even begun. This is where the “Indian” comes in, as she is rescued by Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a Pawnee Union Army veteran.

Whipp has a tight grimace and big dreams about reclaiming lands in Nebraska. And so he and Lady Cornelia become unlikely travelling companions. All of which is an excuse to negotiate a bucket list of cliches. There are one-horse towns, signs creaking in the nonexistent wind, a shoot-out where everyone reaches for their pistol on the count of three.

Hinds, with his limited screen time, gives good bad guy. Stephen Rea will show up in future episodes as a sheriff whom, says Rea, has the “roughness and readiness of an Irish countryman”. Sounds appalling – but let’s wait and see.

At the heart of it all lurks a profound inertness. The dialogue aims for taciturn only to pitch up as undercooked. And though Blunt and Spencer are convincing as prairie underdogs you never believe in them as people pushed to violent extremes. They just come over as a bit grumpy after a difficult day. That perhaps is the ultimate problem with The English. If it looks like a western, it never particularly feels like one.