It’s over 50 years since the teenage RAF pilot-turned-BBC war correspondent Frederick Forsyth wrote his debut novel on a typewriter with a bullet hole in it. Edward Fox played the elusive assassin in a 1973 movie adaptation of The Day Of The Jackal, and now Sky has made a ten-part TV series of the classic thriller with Eddie Redmayne as the hitman with a cold heart and impeccable wardrobe. 

Redmayne is blessed with chameleonic acting skills where he can win an Oscar for playing a paralysed Stephen Hawking one minute, then convince as a pioneering transgender woman the next. That talent for mimicry made him a shoo-in for the Jackal’s many aliases: we find him effortlessly weeping in German or smoothly negotiating in French, and he’s a natural as the plummy Englishman apologising unconvincingly to his long-suffering wife (the smouldering, suspicious Úrsula Corberó). 

He gets across Jackal’s boyish charm and annoying inscrutability; the killer’s constant shapeshifting makes him teasingly unknowable. Among an impressive cast is Lashana Lynch offsetting the macho landscape with her obsessed MI6 officer hunting down the assassin before his next kill; Kate Dickie is excellent too, playing a broken Belfast informant trapped in a criminal web. In Bond-movie style, the action flips relentlessly between Bucharest, Munich and Paris, with sports cars and yachts all casually deployed. In one preposterously OTT scene, the Jackal flees on a horse, which feels like catnip chucked in for fans of the spy-action genre, and there are car chases, bullet storms and fisticuffs aplenty.

The first five episodes are lavishly made and thrilling, with more prosthetic chins, fake liver spots and dapper suits than you can shake a stick at. Corruption at the higher echelons of state power comes as standard and the show nails the pacey adrenaline of cat-and-mouse games with sniper-like precision.

The Day Of The Jackal is broadcast on Thursdays on Sky Atlantic; all episodes available the same day on NOW.