Let's start with the third episode of Adolescence. This was the first to be shot in the British series created by actor Stephen Graham and playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne. Like the other three, it was shot in a single sequence. This one features a young woman, a psychologist, and a pre-adolescent, a schoolboy. He's in custody, accused of having stabbed a fellow student to death, and she's in charge of assessing his degree of responsibility. In the days leading up to Adolescence's release on Netflix on March 13, the harrowing, shocking hour is being hailed as a pinnacle of episodic fiction and the series as one of the great success stories of our time.

However, at the time of shooting, after two weeks of rehearsals, this success was far from a foregone conclusion. Firstly, because 13-year-old Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie, the series' protagonist, had never acted in his life and had to learn not only an hour's worth of dialogue but also immerse himself in the most terrible of situations. Erin Doherty (seen as Princess Anne in The Crown and a gang leader in A Thousand Blows) plays Briony, the psychologist. From London, where, like her colleagues, she was doing interviews, she remembered this first moment: "His [Owen's] age never really factored into it from day one. He just knew his lines (...) It was one of the best experiences as an actor."

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