I was thrilled when it was announced some time ago that BBC Scotland was to produce an ambitious and generously funded history of the Scottish nation from the earliest times to the present.
The project could not have been more timely.
The educational deficit in the teaching of Scottish history in our schools, which has been a scandal for many decades, was now being vigorously debated and plans were put forward for welcome improvements. It was also widely agreed that post-devolution Scotland urgently needed to develop a greater sense of itself and of the nation's place in the world.
The fashioning of that identity depended on a recovery and understanding of the Scottish past, so as to comprehend our present with greater insight.
To their credit, the producers of the new series recognised the exciting advances in the subject made by university researchers over the past 30 years or so, most of which had still to enter the public domain.It was indeed a noble aspiration to expose this new learning to the nation as a whole, using the most powerful medium of communication in our culture.
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What has been the result of all this, and how can it it be judged?
I have viewed a few of the programmes in the first series, seen a DVD of the first instalment of series two, which goes out this evening, and also read the notes supplied by BBC Scotland describing the content of the remaining episodes.
It would be churlish not to begin by acknowledging some of the positive results. A narrative televisual history of the Scottish past has now been produced that, within the limitations of the medium, is broadly accurate as far as the facts go.
Some colleagues will disagree with that verdict and, to be sure, they might well have a case in some respects. We need to bear in mind, however, that the audience the producers had in mind is the general Scottish public, to most of whom the material shown may be totally new, rather than a critical conference of expert scholars who sometimes excel in pedantic discourse.
The fact that the programme is being transmitted at prime time on Sundays must also inevitably lead to a much higher profile for Scottish history; that must be a good thing for all concerned. In addition, the television series is but the core of a number of other initiatives - including radio programmes, exhibitions, seminars and discussions - that are running in parallel. For all of this, BBC Scotland deserves warm congratulations for its enterprise and creative effort.
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For me, however, the television series itself has been a profound disappointment and a missed opportunity. Perhaps naively, I thought the programme makers would have been able to scale the heights and really capture the epic story of a small country with a massive global impact - and, by so doing, come close to the creative excellence of Ken Burns's American Civil War, The Great War and The World at War, the three greatest icons of television history.
Compared with these giants of the small screen, however, A History of Scotland is but a mediocre B-movie, inferior even to several of the cheaper, humdrum documentaries on satellite history channels.
The project has been emasculated by its flaws. Instead of focusing on the few big themes that have fashioned the modern nation, the producers elected to go for a narrative, blow-by-blow account from earliest times to the present, of the kind that used to bore schoolchildren of my generation to death.
The result was predictable: old-fashioned narrative description without the full-blooded clash of ideas, argument and analysis - the very qualities that make history so vibrant as a subject.
The series is fatally imbalanced. Only three programmes of the 10 shown cover the period after 1750, the very years that moulded the Scotland that we know today.
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Not surprisingly, such seminal themes as the Enlightenment and the Scottish diaspora receive scant attention or are squeezed out altogether. These extraordinary omissions or partial oversights destroy the credibility of the project.
The enormous scale of migration from these shores from medieval times almost to the present day is so crucial that, in my view, our history can no longer be understood without bringing the diaspora to the very heart of the analysis.
Then there is the hapless, long-haired presenter, Neil Oliver, who must have been signed up because he is in the visual tradition of Braveheart and the Highlander movies.
He does, to be fair, try his enthusiastic best, but sheer effort cannot conceal the sad lack of personal authority or presence.
It is not entirely his fault. He has been given a lame, boring and flaccid script to memorise and repeat to camera.
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Consider what could have been: one of Scotland's most celebrated acting talents (no, not Sir Sean) delivering a memorable script written by the likes of Neal Ascherson, Andy Marr, Jim Naughtie or Willie McIlvanney? That would indeed have been worthwhile. A missed opportunity indeed.
Tom Devine is the Sir William Fraser professor of Scottish history and palaeography and head of the school of history, classics and archaeology at the University of Edinburgh