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Anyone who’s worked a night shift will know what a bizarre place the world feels in the small hours of the morning. It can seem like you’re the only one around, that everyone else is asleep and you have the world to yourself, but the darkness can be enveloping and the night isolating and lonely.

Loneliness is the driving force in new Channel 5 thriller The Night Caller, which follows a 50-something cabbie in Liverpool named Tony, played by Sherwood and Spooks’ Robert Glenister, who spends his nights ferrying people around the city in his black cab.

He used to be a respected teacher, but having lost his job, his marriage, and his confidence, his days have become a monotonous cycle of night shifts, lane swimming, and being alone in his house. That is until he plucks up the courage to dial into NightTalk, the late-night radio talk show he listens to while driving his taxi, growing an attachment to host Lawrence – played by Gotham’s Sean Pertwee – and becoming a “friend of the show”.

For the first time in years, he feels listened to, but his connection soon becomes an unhealthy obsession for Tony – with disastrous consequences when he realises Lawrence isn’t the man he purports to be.

“I was really intrigued by Tony and wondered why this man is the way he is,” says Glenister, 64.

“This is the story of a man who has suffered a major trauma that nobody knows about, plus he’s lost his job as a teacher. He has chosen to work nights and when we meet him he’s at a very low ebb.

"He feels like he has been thrown on the scrapheap and then he finds solace talking to the presenter of a late-night radio talk show, who gets inside his head. And then it all goes Pete Tong!”

“But I also like the fact that the series starts as a thriller, and then becomes something far more involved, far more complicated and human,” he adds.

“If the audience makes a decision about what the show is by the end of episode one they should keep watching, because the chances are the series is not what they think it is.”

Glenister says he “completely gets” why someone like Tony would become attached to a late-night talk radio host, with their “velvet voices” which draw you in.

“I would imagine,” he says, “that there are plenty of regular callers to various late-night chat show hosts, who feel like they are friends, and I get it completely”.

“It’s dangerous if you are in a vulnerable position like Tony is: he’s lonely, working nights, and I can completely understand how you can develop a relationship with someone coming out of the radio in your car,” he continues.

The Night Caller will be on Channel 5 from Sunday, July 7 to Wednesday, July 10 at 9pm, and on demand on My5.

Robert Glenister stars in The Night Caller, ‘an uncomfortable watch’ with ‘a pressure cooker intensity’