Spooks

Like many people, my previous standard for TV-drama-as-crack-cocaine-substitute was the early seasons of the American series 24, a programme that started good, got better in its second run, and then gradually, sadly, descended into a mire of repetitive plots and neo-con torture porn fantasy.

Despite this sad demise, I never really expected to find anything in TV quite as breathlessly exciting as 24's early classic moments, such as the villainous Nina Myers holding Jack Bauer under gunshot whilst demanding a pardon for his murder in exchange for crucial information... prior to actually committing it.

I'd reckoned without the British spy series Spooks. Having discovered Spooks about 7 or 8 years too late, I've happily had a lot of DVD box sets to catch up on. For those that don't know, Spooks follows an anti-terrorist unit in the British domestic secret service MI-5. Unlike most such series (and the above-mentioned 24), Spooks is not afraid to kill off its heroes; whether someone makes it to the end of the season or not is never a certainty and that ramps up the tension considerably.

Spooks' finest moment for me so far has been season 7, the opening episode of which sees the leading man of the previous 4 years killed in a car bombing and which then accelerates through multiple twists and turns towards the discovery of a mole in MI-5 in the penultimate episode. Had the series stopped there, it would have already rated as one of my favourite spy dramas... but then comes the final episode in which the world is turned upside down, no-one can be trusted, villains turn to heroes and all join a frantic chase to prevent the destruction of London in a faked terrorist incident.

Try getting to sleep after you've seen that one.